Nescience

“ That which defines me, that which makes me stand apart from the whole of the rest of humanity, is the fact that I unmasked Christian morality. For this reason I was in need of a word which conveyed the idea of a challenge to everybody. Not to have awakened to these discoveries before, struck me as being the sign of the greatest uncleanliness that mankind has on its conscience, as self-deception become instinctive, as the fundamental will to be blind to every phenomenon, all causality and all reality ”

“ Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. ”

“ When the natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are thought to be conjured up by phantom concepts of superstition, by “God,” by “spirits,” and by “souls,” as merely moral consequences, in the form of rewards, punishments, hints, and educational means,—then the whole basis of knowledge is destroyed,—then the greatest crime against man has been perpetrated.—Sin, I repeat, this form of self-pollution par excellence on the part of man, was invented in order to make science, culture and every elevation and noble trait in man quite impossible ”

“ And this is also true,—numberless single observations on the human and all-too-human have first been discovered, and given utterance to, in circles of society which were accustomed to offer sacrifice therewith to a clever desire to please, and not to scientific knowledge,—and the odour of that old home of the moral maxim, a very seductive odour, has attached itself almost inseparably to the whole species, so that on its account the scientific man involuntarily betrays a certain distrust of this species and its earnestness. ”

“ And if, as some have declared, this moral condemnation of, and dissatisfaction with, reality, is an ineradicable instinct, is it not possible that this instinct may perhaps belong to the ineradicable stupidities and immodesties of our species?—But in saying this, we are doing precisely what we deprecate; the point of view of desirability and of unauthorised fault-finding is part and parcel of the whole character of worldly phenomena just as every injustice and imperfection is—it is our very notion of "perfection" which is never gratified. ”

“ And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. ”

“ Again, others have collected all the characteristic features of our world of phenomenon,—that is, the idea of the world spun out of intellectual errors and inherited by us,—and instead of accusing the intellect as the offenders, they have laid the blame on the nature of things as being the cause of the hard fact of this very sinister character of the world, and have preached the deliverance from Being. ”

“ How you hate honest, simple, and clean souls; how you avoid their innocent glances! That better knowledge whose representatives they are, and [pg 373] whose voice you hear only too distinctly within yourselves when it questions your belief,—how you try to cast suspicion upon it as a bad habit, as a disease of the age, as the neglect and infection of your own intellectual health! ”

“ All methods, all the hypotheses on which the science of our day depends, were treated with the profoundest contempt for centuries: on their account a man used to be banished from the society of respectable people—he was held to be an "enemy of God," a reviler of the highest ideal, a madman.
We had the whole pathos of mankind against us,—our notion of what "truth" ought to be, of what the service of truth ought to be, our objectivity, our method, our calm, cautious and distrustful manner were altogether despicable.... ”

“ In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to self-approval—the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. ”

“ The fatal nature of a belief in God as the reality of the highest moral qualities: through it, all real values were denied and systematically regarded as valueless. Thus Anti-Nature ascended the throne. With relentless logic the last step was reached, and this was the absolute demand to deny Nature. ”

“ My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race.
All forms of error are uprooted in Science, on the same basis whereby sickness is healed,—namely, by the establishment, through reason, revelation, and Science, of the nothingness of every claim of error, even the doctrine of heredity and other physical causes. You demonstrate the process of Science, and it proves my view conclusively, that mortal mind is the cause of all disease. ”

“ This alone is morality.—“Thou shalt not know”:—the rest follows as a matter of course, God’s panic did not deprive him of his intelligence. How can one guard against science? For ages this was his principal problem. Reply: man must be kicked out of paradise! Happiness, leisure leads to thinking,—all thoughts are bad thoughts.... Man must not think.—And the “priest-per-se” proceeds to invent distress, death, the vital danger of pregnancy, every kind of misery, decrepitude, and affliction, and above all disease,—all these are but weapons [Pg 199] employed in the struggle with science! ”

“ In the course of our speculation on Divine Providence we proceed next to the consideration of the doctrine of the depravity of human reason: a doctrine derogatory to the nature of man, and the rank and character of being which he holds in the universe, and which, if admitted to be true overturns knowledge and science and renders learning, instruction and books useless and impertinent ”

“ When science is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal—but these are cases of such rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to preclude the general judgment being affected thereby—science is a hiding-place for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, despectio sui [13] , bad conscience—it is the very anxiety that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? ”

“ Whether it is more probable that we are ignorant of the natural cause of an event, or that we know the supernatural one? That, in old times, when the powers of nature were less known than at present, a certain set of men were themselves deceived, or had some hidden motive for deceiving others; or that God begat a Son, who, in His legislation, measuring merit by belief, evidenced Himself to be totally ignorant of the powers of the human mind—of what is voluntary, and what is the contrary? ”

“ The notion of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the universe,” was invented against science,—against the deliverance of man from the priest.... Man must not cast his glance upon the outer world, he must turn it inwards into himself; he must not as [Pg 200] a learner look cleverly and cautiously into things; he must not see at all: he must suffer. ”

“ To deny the existence or reality of matter, and yet admit the reality of moral evil, sin, or to say that the Divine Mind is conscious of evil, yet is not conscious of matter, is erroneous. This error stultifies the logic of Divine Science, and must interfere with its practical demonstration. ”

“ After all, judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms,—per se such judgments are nonsense. ”

“ Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner—all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.—Looking back, one may almost ask one’s self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. ”

“ But, as they cannot lay hold of it, they try to discover reasons why this privilege is withheld from them. “Some merely apparent quality, some deception must be the cause of our not being able to ascertain the nature of Being: where is the deceiver?” “We have him,” they cry rejoicing, “it is sensuality!” These senses, which in other things are so immoral, cheat us concerning the true world. Moral: we must get rid of the deception of the senses, of Becoming, of history, of [Pg 18] falsehood.—History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood. ”

“ But here they are intended to remain ignorant to the very backbone:—they are intended to have neither eyes, ears, words, nor thoughts for this, their "wickedness"; indeed knowledge here is already evil. ”

“ Moral: we must say “no” to everything in which the senses believe: to all the rest of mankind: all that belongs to the “people.” Let us be philosophers, mummies, monotono-theists, grave-diggers!—And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, infected with all the faults of logic that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it be impudent enough to pose as if it were real! ”

“ Self-destroying error; a kingdom divided against itself, which cannot stand; material knowledge, The higher false knowledge builds on the basis of evidence obtained from the five corporeal senses, the more confusion ensues, and the more certain is the downfall of its structure. ”

“ There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? ”

“ You want to be right in our eyes as well as in yours, and especially in yours !—and an irritable and subtle evil conscience so often incites and urges you on against your very enthusiasm. How ingenious you then grow in the outwitting and soothing of this conscience! How much you hate the honest, simple, clean souls ”

“ All questions of politics, of social order, of education, have been falsified, root and branch, owing to the fact that the most noxious men have been taken for great men, and that people were taught to despise the small things, or rather the fundamental things, of life. ”

“ He, however, who makes thinking itself, and consequently "the spirit," responsible for the falseness of the world—an honourable exit, which every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails himself of—he who regards this world, including space, time, form, and movement, as falsely DEDUCED, would have at least good reason in the end to become distrustful also of all thinking; has it not hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy tricks? ”

“ At this juncture I cannot avoid trying to give a tentative and provisional expression to my own hypothesis concerning the origin of the bad conscience: it is difficult to make it fully appreciated, and it requires continuous meditation, attention, and digestion. I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has ever experienced—that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned within the pale of society and of peace. ”

“ Hiding one's Intelligence.—When we surprise some one in the act of hiding his intelligence from us we call him evil: the more so if we suspect that it is his civility and benevolence which have induced him to do so. ”

“ This kernel, however, is a witty though often impertinent joke on intellectual subjects, a subtle and daring combination of words, such as is necessary in a society of thinkers as gilding for a scientific pill—but, enveloped as it is in an almost impenetrable cover, it exhibits itself as the most abstruse science, and likewise as the worst possible moral tediousness. ”

“ Their unsoundness arises from the fact that they reason from false premises; and they get their false premises from their diseased imaginations, whose vagaries they take for realities.
2. Here a difficulty presents itself, which we must explain at once, namely, how can there be unsoundness of mind at all? Is not the intellect of man a simple power, and his soul a simple being? How can a simple being become deranged? ”

“ With what consequences it is now very easy to see, after it has been shown by many examples how the mistakes of the greatest philosophers generally have their starting-point in a wrong explanation of certain human actions and sensations, just as on the ground of an erroneous analysis—for instance, that of the so-called unselfish actions—a false ethic is built up ; then, to harmonise with this again, religion and mythological confusion are brought in to assist, and finally the shades of these dismal spirits fall also over physics and the general mode of regarding the world. ”

“ By stern virtue, gloomy looks, affected suspicion against mankind and existence, by coarse jests, by contempt of a more refined mode of life, by pathos and pretensions, by cynical philosophy—nay, in the constant consciousness of his deficiency he las developed into a character. ”