inspired by the impulse to self preservation or, more accurately, by
the desire for pleasure and for the avoidance of pain in the individual.
Thus are they occasioned, but they are not, therefore, bad. "Pain self
prepared" does not exist, except in the brains of the philosophers, any
more than "pleasure self prepared" (sympathy in the Schopenhauer sense).
In the condition anterior to the state we kill the creature, be it man
or ape, that attempts to pluck the fruit of a tree before we pluck it
ourselves should we happen to be hungry at the time and making for that
tree: as we would do to-day, so far as the brute is concerned, if we
were wandering in savage regions.--The bad acts which most disturb us at
present do so because of the erroneous supposition that the one who is
guilty of them towards us has a free will in the matter and that it was
within his discretion not to have done these evil things. This belief in
discretionary power inspires hate, thirst for revenge, malice, the
entire perversion of the mental processes, whereas we would feel in no
way incensed against the brute, as we hold it irresponsible. To inflict
pain not from the instinct of self preservation but in requital--this is
the consequence of false judgment and is equally a guiltless course of
conduct. The individual can, in that condition which is anterior to the
state, act with fierceness and violence for the intimidation of another
creature, in order to render his own power more secure as a result of
such acts of intimidation. Thus acts the powerful, the superior, the
original state founder, who subjugates the weaker. He has the right to
do so, as the state nowadays assumes the same right, or, to be more
accurate, there is no right that can conflict with this. A foundation
for all morality can first be laid only when a stronger individuality or
a collective individuality, for example society, the state, subjects the
single personalities, hence builds upon their unification and
establishes a bond of union. Morality results from compulsion, it is
indeed itself one long compulsion to which obedience is rendered in
order that pain may be avoided. At first it is but custom, later free
obedience and finally almost instinct. At last it is (like everything
habitual and natural) associated with pleasure--and is then called
virtue.
100
=Shame.=--Shame exists wherever a "mystery" exists: but this is a
religious notion which in the earlier period of human civilization had
great vogue. Everywhere there were circumscribed spots to which access
was denied on account of some divine law, except in special
circumstances. At first these spots were quite extensive, inasmuch as
stipulated areas could not be trod by the uninitiated, who, when near
them, felt tremors and anxieties. This sentiment was frequently
transferred to other relationships, for example to sexual relations,
which, as the privilege and gateway of mature age, must be withdrawn
from the contemplation of youth for its own advantage: relations which
many divinities were busy in preserving and sanctifying, images of which
divinities were duly placed in marital chambers as guardians. (In
Turkish such an apartment is termed a harem or holy thing, the same word
also designating the vestibule of a mosque). So, too, Kingship is
regarded as a centre from which power and brilliance stream forth, as a
mystery to the subjects, impregnated with secrecy and shame, sentiments
still quite operative among peoples who in other respects are without
any shame at all. So, too, is the whole world of inward states, the
so-called "soul," even now, for all non-philosophical persons, a
"mystery," and during countless ages it was looked upon as a something
of divine origin, in direct communion with deity. It is, therefore, an
adytum and occasions shame.
101
=Judge Not.=--Care must be taken, in the contemplation of earlier ages,
that there be no falling into unjust scornfulness. The injustice in
slavery, the cruelty in the subjugation of persons and peoples must not
be estimated by our standard. For in that period the instinct of justice
was not so highly developed. Who dare reproach the Genoese Calvin for
burning the physician Servetus at the stake? It was a proceeding growing
out of his convictions. And the Inquisition, too, had its justification.
The only thing is that the prevailing views were false and led to those
proceedings which seem so cruel to us, simply because such views have
become foreign to us. Besides, what is the burning alive of one
individual compared with eternal hell pains for everybody else? And yet
this idea then had hold of all the world without in the least vitiating,
with its frightfulness, the other idea of a god. Even we nowadays are
hard and merciless to political revolutionists, but that is because we
are in the habit of believing the state a necessity, and hence the
cruelty of the proceeding is not so much understood as in the other
cases where the points of view are repudiated. The cruelty to animals
shown by children and Italians is due to the same misunderstanding. The
animal, owing to the exigencies of the church catechism, is placed too
far below the level of mankind.--Much, too, that is frightful and
inhuman in history, and which is almost incredible, is rendered less
atrocious by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who
executes are different persons. The former does not witness the
performance and hence it makes no strong impression on him. The latter
obeys a superior and hence feels no responsibility. Most princes and
military chieftains appear, through lack of true perception, cruel and
hard without really being so.--Egoism is not bad because the idea of the
"neighbor"--the word is of Christian origin and does not correspond to
truth--is very weak in us, and we feel ourselves, in regard to him, as
free from responsibility as if plants and stones were involved. That
another is in suffering must be learned and it can never be wholly
learned.
102
"=Man Always Does Right.="--We do not blame nature when she sends a
thunder storm and makes us wet: why then do we term the man who inflicts
injury immoral? Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary,
ruling, free will, and in the former necessity. But this distinction is
a delusion. Moreover, even the intentional infliction of injury is not,
in all circumstances termed immoral. Thus, we kill a fly intentionally
without thinking very much about it, simply because its buzzing about is
disagreeable; and we punish a criminal and inflict pain upon him in
order to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is the
individual who, for the sake of preserving himself or in order to spare
himself pain, does injury with design: in the second case, it is the
state. All ethic deems intentional infliction of injury justified by
necessity; that is when it is a matter of self preservation. But these
two points of view are sufficient to explain all bad acts done by man to
men. It is desired to obtain pleasure or avoid pain. In any sense, it is
a question, always, of self preservation. Socrates and Plato are right:
whatever man does he always does right: that is, does what seems to him
good (advantageous) according to the degree of advancement his intellect
has attained, which is always the measure of his rational capacity.
103
=The Inoffensive in Badness.=--Badness has not for its object the
infliction of pain upon others but simply our own satisfaction as, for
instance, in the case of thirst for vengeance or of nerve excitation.
Every act of teasing shows what pleasure is caused by the display of
our power over others and what feelings of delight are experienced in
the sense of domination. Is there, then, anything immoral in feeling
pleasure in the pain of others? Is malicious joy devilish, as
Schopenhauer says? In the realm of nature we feel joy in breaking
boughs, shattering rocks, fighting with wild beasts, simply to attest
our strength thereby. Should not the knowledge that another suffers on
our account here, in this case, make the same kind of act, (which, by
the way, arouses no qualms of conscience in us) immoral also? But if we
had not this knowledge there would be no pleasure in one's own
superiority or power, for this pleasure is experienced only in the
suffering of another, as in the case of teasing. All pleasure is, in
itself, neither good nor bad. Whence comes the conviction that one
should not cause pain in others in order to feel pleasure oneself?
Simply from the standpoint of utility, that is, in consideration of the
consequences, of ultimate pain, since the injured party or state will
demand satisfaction and revenge. This consideration alone can have led
to the determination to renounce such pleasure.--Sympathy has the
satisfaction of others in view no more than, as already stated, badness
has the pain of others in view. For there are at least two (perhaps many
more) elementary ingredients in personal gratification which enter
largely into our self satisfaction: one of them being the pleasure of
the emotion, of which species is sympathy with tragedy, and another,
when the impulse is to action, being the pleasure of exercising one's
power. Should a sufferer be very dear to us, we divest ourselves of pain
by the performance of acts of sympathy.--With the exception of some few
philosophers, men have placed sympathy very low in the rank of moral
feelings: and rightly.
104
=Self Defence.=--If self defence is in general held a valid
justification, then nearly every manifestation of so called immoral
egoism must be justified, too. Pain is inflicted, robbery or killing
done in order to maintain life or to protect oneself and ward off harm.
A man lies when cunning and delusion are valid means of self
preservation. To injure intentionally when our safety and our existence
are involved, or the continuance of our well being, is conceded to be
moral. The state itself injures from this motive when it hangs
criminals. In unintentional injury the immoral, of course, can not be
present, as accident alone is involved. But is there any sort of
intentional injury in which our existence and the maintenance of our
well being be not involved? Is there such a thing as injuring from
absolute badness, for example, in the case of cruelty? If a man does not
know what pain an act occasions, that act is not one of wickedness. Thus
the child is not bad to the animal, not evil. It disturbs and rends it
as if it were one of its playthings. Does a man ever fully know how much
pain an act may cause another? As far as our nervous system extends, we
shield ourselves from pain. If it extended further, that is, to our
fellow men, we would never cause anyone else any pain (except in such
cases as we cause it to ourselves, when we cut ourselves, surgically, to
heal our ills, or strive and trouble ourselves to gain health). We
conclude from analogy that something pains somebody and can in
consequence, through recollection and the power of imagination, feel
pain also. But what a difference there always is between the tooth ache
and the pain (sympathy) that the spectacle of tooth ache occasions!
Therefore when injury is inflicted from so called badness the degree of
pain thereby experienced is always unknown to us: in so far, however, as
pleasure is felt in the act (a sense of one's own power, of one's own
excitation) the act is committed to maintain the well being of the
individual and hence comes under the purview of self defence and lying
for self preservation. Without pleasure, there is no life; the struggle
for pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether the individual shall
carry on this struggle in such a way that he be called good or in such a
way that he be called bad is something that the standard and the
capacity of his own intellect must determine for him.
105
=Justice that Rewards.=--Whoever has fully understood the doctrine of
absolute irresponsibility can no longer include the so called rewarding
and punishing justice in the idea of justice, if the latter be taken to
mean that to each be given his due. For he who is punished does not
deserve the punishment. He is used simply as a means to intimidate
others from certain acts. Equally, he who is rewarded does not merit the
reward. He could not act any differently than he did act. Hence the
reward has only the significance of an encouragement to him and others
as a motive for subsequent acts. The praise is called out only to him
who is running in the race and not to him who has arrived at the goal.
Something that comes to someone as his own is neither a punishment nor a
reward. It is given to him from utiliarian considerations, without his
having any claim to it in justice. Hence one must say "the wise man
praises not because a good act has been done" precisely as was once
said: "the wise man punishes not because a bad act has been done but in
order that a bad act may not be done." If punishment and reward ceased,
there would cease with them the most powerful incentives to certain acts
and away from other acts. The purposes of men demand their continuance
[of punishment and reward] and inasmuch as punishment and reward, blame
and praise operate most potently upon vanity, these same purposes of men
imperatively require the continuance of vanity.
106
=The Water Fall.=--At the sight of a water fall we may opine that in the
countless curves, spirations and dashes of the waves we behold freedom
of the will and of the impulses. But everything is compulsory,
everything can be mathematically calculated. Thus it is, too, with human
acts. We would be able to calculate in advance every single action if we
were all knowing, as well as every advance in knowledge, every delusion,
every bad deed. The acting individual himself is held fast in the
illusion of volition. If, on a sudden, the entire movement of the world
stopped short, and an all knowing and reasoning intelligence were there
to take advantage of this pause, he could foretell the future of every
being to the remotest ages and indicate the path that would be taken in
the world's further course. The deception of the acting individual as
regards himself, the assumption of the freedom of the will, is a part of
this computable mechanism.
107
=Non-Responsibility and Non-Guilt.=--The absolute irresponsibility of
man for his acts and his nature is the bitterest drop in the cup of him
who has knowledge, if he be accustomed to behold in responsibility and
duty the patent of nobility of his human nature. All his estimates,
preferences, dislikes are thus made worthless and false. His deepest
sentiment, with which he honored the sufferer, the hero, sprang from an
error. He may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is irrational to
blame and praise nature and necessity. Just as he cherishes the
beautiful work of art, but does not praise it (as it is incapable of
doing anything for itself), just as he stands in the presence of plants,
he must stand in the presence of human conduct, his own included. He may
admire strength, beauty, capacity, therein, but he can discern no merit.
The chemical process and the conflict of the elements, the ordeal of
the invalid who strives for convalescence, are no more merits than the
soul-struggles and extremities in which one is torn this way and that by
contending motives until one finally decides in favor of the
strongest--as the phrase has it, although, in fact, it is the strongest
motive that decides for us. All these motives, however, whatever fine
names we may give them, have grown from the same roots in which we
believe the baneful poisons lurk. Between good and bad actions there is
no difference in kind but, at most, in degree. Good acts are sublimated
evil. Bad acts are degraded, imbruted good. The very longing of the
individual for self gratification (together with the fear of being
deprived of it) obtains satisfaction in all circumstances, let the
individual act as he may, that is, as he must: be it in deeds of vanity,
revenge, pleasure, utility, badness, cunning, be it in deeds of self
sacrifice, sympathy or knowledge. The degrees of rational capacity
determine the direction in which this longing impels: every society,
every individual has constantly present a comparative classification of
benefits in accordance with which conduct is determined and others are
judged. But this standard perpetually changes. Many acts are called bad
that are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence that decided
for them was low. Indeed, in a certain sense, all acts now are stupid,
for the highest degree of human intelligence that has yet been attained
will in time most certainly be surpassed and then, in retrospection, all
our present conduct and opinion will appear as narrow and petty as we
now deem the conduct and opinion of savage peoples and ages.--To
perceive all these things may occasion profound pain but there is,
nevertheless, a consolation. Such pains are birth pains. The butterfly
insists upon breaking through the cocoon, he presses through it, tears
it to pieces, only to be blinded and confused by the strange light, by
the realm of liberty. By such men as are capable of this sadness--how
few there are!--will the first attempt be made to see if humanity may
convert itself from a thing of morality to a thing of wisdom. The sun of
a new gospel sheds its first ray upon the loftiest height in the souls
of those few: but the clouds are massed there, too, thicker than ever,
and not far apart are the brightest sunlight and the deepest gloom.
Everything is necessity--so says the new knowledge: and this knowledge
is itself necessity. All is guiltlessness, and knowledge is the way to
insight into this guiltlessness. If pleasure, egoism, vanity be
necessary to attest the moral phenomena and their richest blooms, the
instinct for truth and accuracy of knowledge; if delusion and confusion
of the imagination were the only means whereby mankind could gradually
lift itself up to this degree of self enlightenment and self
emancipation--who would venture to disparage the means? Who would have
the right to feel sad if made aware of the goal to which those paths
lead? Everything in the domain of ethic is evolved, changeable,
tottering; all things flow, it is true--but all things are also in the
stream: to their goal. Though within us the hereditary habit of
erroneous judgment, love, hate, may be ever dominant, yet under the
influence of awaking knowledge it will ever become weaker: a new habit,
that of understanding, not-loving, not-hating, looking from above, grows
up within us gradually and in the same soil, and may, perhaps, in
thousands of years be powerful enough to endow mankind with capacity to
develop the wise, guiltless man (conscious of guiltlessness) as
unfailingly as it now developes the unwise, irrational, guilt-conscious
man--that is to say, the necessary higher step, not the opposite of it.
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE.
108
=The Double Contest Against Evil.=--If an evil afflicts us we can either
so deal with it as to remove its cause or else so deal with it that its
effect upon our feeling is changed: hence look upon the evil as a
benefit of which the uses will perhaps first become evident in some
subsequent period. Religion and art (and also the metaphysical
philosophy) strive to effect an alteration of the feeling, partly by an
alteration of our judgment respecting the experience (for example, with
the aid of the dictum "whom God loves, he chastizes") partly by the
awakening of a joy in pain, in emotion especially (whence the art of
tragedy had its origin). The more one is disposed to interpret away and
justify, the less likely he is to look directly at the causes of evil
and eliminate them. An instant alleviation and narcotizing of pain, as
is usual in the case of tooth ache, is sufficient for him even in the
severest suffering. The more the domination of religions and of all
narcotic arts declines, the more searchingly do men look to the
elimination of evil itself, which is a rather bad thing for the tragic
poets--for there is ever less and less material for tragedy, since the
domain of unsparing, immutable destiny grows constantly more
circumscribed--and a still worse thing for the priests, for these last
have lived heretofore upon the narcoticizing of human ill.
109
=Sorrow is Knowledge.=--How willingly would not one exchange the false
assertions of the homines religiosi that there is a god who commands us
to be good, who is the sentinel and witness of every act, every moment,
every thought, who loves us, who plans our welfare in every
misfortune--how willingly would not one exchange these for truths as
healing, beneficial and grateful as those delusions! But there are no
such truths. Philosophy can at most set up in opposition to them other
metaphysical plausibilities (fundamental untruths as well). The tragedy
of it all is that, although one cannot believe these dogmas of religion
and metaphysics if one adopts in heart and head the potent methods of
truth, one has yet become, through human evolution, so tender,
susceptible, sensitive, as to stand in need of the most effective means
of rest and consolation. From this state of things arises the danger
that, through the perception of truth or, more accurately, seeing
through delusion, one may bleed to death. Byron has put this into
deathless verse:
"Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life."
Against such cares there is no better protective than the light fancy of
Horace, (at any rate during the darkest hours and sun eclipses of the
soul) expressed in the words
"quid aeternis minorem
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes."[22]
[22] Then wherefore should you, who are mortal, outwear
Your soul with a profitless burden of care
Say, why should we not, flung at ease neath this pine,
Or a plane-tree's broad umbrage, quaff gaily our wine?
(Translation of Sir Theodore Martin.)
At any rate, light fancy or heavy heartedness of any degree must be
better than a romantic retrogression and desertion of one's flag, an
approach to Christianity in any form: for with it, in the present state
of knowledge, one can have nothing to do without hopelessly defiling
one's intellectual integrity and surrendering it unconditionally. These
woes may be painful enough, but without pain one cannot become a leader
and guide of humanity: and woe to him who would be such and lacks this
pure integrity of the intellect!
110