The Four Great Errors

1 The error of confusing cause and consequence.—There is no more dangerous error than mistaking the consequence for the cause: I call it the true corruption of reason. Yet this error belongs to humanity’s oldest and newest habits: among us it is even sacred, bearing the names “religion” and “morality.” Every proposition formulated by religion and morality contains it; priests and moral lawgivers are the authors of this corruption of reason.—Let me take an example: everyone knows the famous Cornaro’s book, in which he recommends his meager diet as the recipe for a long and happy life—a virtuous life as well. Few books have been so widely read; even now, many thousands of copies are printed every year in England. I do not doubt that scarcely any book—the Bible duly excepted—has done so much harm, shortened so many lives, as this well-intentioned curiosity. The reason: confusion of the consequence with the cause. The honest Italian saw his diet as the cause of his long life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the extraordinary slowness of his metabolism, his low expenditure, was the cause of his meager diet. He had no choice whether to eat little or much; his frugality was no “free will”: he became ill when he ate more. But anyone who is not a carp does not merely benefit from eating properly: he needs to. A scholar of our day, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would ruin himself on Cornaro’s regimen. Believe someone who knows.—

2 The most general formula underlying every religion and morality runs: “Do this and that, leave this and that undone—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 that formula becomes its opposite—the first example of my “revaluation of all values”: a well-constituted person, a “happy one,” must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from others; he carries the order he embodies physiologically into his relations with people and things. As a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness… A long life and abundant offspring are not virtue’s reward; rather, virtue itself is that slowing of the metabolism which brings, among other things, a long life and abundant offspring—in short, Cornaro’s way—in its train.—Church and morality say: “A lineage, a people is ruined by vice and luxury.” My restored reason says: when a people is going to ruin, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury follow from it—that is, the need for ever stronger and more frequent stimuli familiar to every exhausted nature. This young man grows pale and withered before his time. His friends say: this or that illness is to blame. I say: his falling ill, his failure to withstand the illness, was already the consequence of an impoverished life, an inherited exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party is ruining itself with a mistake like that. My higher politics says: a party that makes such mistakes is finished—it no longer has the surety of its instincts. Every error, in every sense, is the consequence of degenerate instincts, of a disintegration of the will: that almost defines what is bad. Everything good is instinct—and consequently easy, necessary, free. Toil is an objection; the god is characteristically distinct from the hero—in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity.

3 The error of a false causality.—People have always believed they knew what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge—or, more precisely, our belief that we knew? From the realm of the famous “inner facts,” none of which has yet proved factual. We believed ourselves causal agents in the act of willing; here, at least, we thought we had caught causality in the act. Nor did anyone doubt that everything preceding an action, its causes, must be sought in consciousness, and would be found there if sought—as “motives”: otherwise one would not have been free to act, or responsible for the action. Finally, who would have disputed that a thought is caused? That the I causes the thought?… Of these three “inner facts” that seemed to guarantee causality, the first and most persuasive is the will as cause; the conception of consciousness (“mind”) as cause, and later still of the I (the “subject”) as cause, were merely later births, once causality had been established as given in the will, as an empirical fact… Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The “inner world” is full of deceptive images and misleading lights: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, and consequently explains nothing either—it merely accompanies events, and may also be absent. The so-called “motive”: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to the deed, more likely to conceal what precedes a deed than to display it. And the I above all! It has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!… What follows? There are no mental causes at all! All the alleged empirical evidence for them has gone to the devil! That is what follows!—And we had made a pretty misuse of that “evidence”: on its strength we had created the world as a world of causes, a world of wills, a world of minds. The oldest and longest-lived psychology was at work here, and did nothing else: to it, every event was a deed, every deed the consequence of a will; the world became a multitude of doers, a doer (a “subject”) was slipped beneath everything that happened. Human beings projected their three “inner facts,” what they believed in most firmly—the will, the mind, the I—out of themselves. Only from the concept of the I did they extract the concept of being; they posited “things” as existing after their own image, after their concept of the I as cause. What wonder that later they always found in things only what they had put into them?—The thing itself, to repeat, the concept of a thing: merely a reflection of belief in the I as cause… And even your atom, gentlemen mechanists and physicists—how much error, how much rudimentary psychology still lingers in your atom!—Not to mention the “thing in itself,” that horrifying, shameful thing of the metaphysicians! The error of mind as cause confused with reality! And made the measure of reality! And called God!—

4 The error of imaginary causes.—To begin with dreams: a particular sensation, arising for instance from a distant cannon shot, is retrospectively supplied with a cause—often an entire little novel in which the dreamer himself plays the leading role. Meanwhile the sensation persists, in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the drive to find causes allows it into the foreground—no longer as an accident, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in a causal setting, in an apparent reversal of time. What comes later, the account of its motive, is experienced first, often with a hundred details flashing past; the shot follows… What has happened? The images produced by a certain condition have been mistaken for its cause.—In fact, we do the same when awake. Most of our general feelings—every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, explosion in the interplay and opposition of our organs, and especially the state of the sympathetic nerve—arouse our drive to find causes: we want a reason for feeling as we do—for feeling ill or feeling well. Merely establishing the fact that we feel this way is never enough for us: we admit this fact—become conscious of it—only once we have given it some sort of motivation.—Memory, which becomes active in such cases without our knowing it, calls up earlier states of the same kind and the causal interpretations that have grown together with them—not their causality. To be sure, memory also calls up the belief that the images, the accompanying processes in consciousness, were the causes. Thus a habit of interpreting causes in a particular way develops, a habit that in truth obstructs and even excludes investigation of the cause.

5 The psychological explanation.—Reducing something unknown to something known brings relief, reassurance, satisfaction, and also a feeling of power. The unknown brings danger, unease, anxiety—the first instinct is to remove these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom the sole concern is to get rid of oppressive images, we are not particularly scrupulous about the means of getting rid of them: the first idea that explains the unknown as known feels so good that we “take it for true.” Proof by pleasure (“by strength”) as a criterion of truth.—The drive to find causes is thus conditioned and aroused by the feeling of fear. If at all possible, the “Why?” is meant to provide not so much a cause for its own sake as a particular kind of cause—a reassuring, liberating, relieving cause. The first consequence of this need is to posit as cause something already known, experienced, inscribed in memory. The new, the unexperienced, the unfamiliar is ruled out as a cause.—What is sought as a cause, then, is not simply some kind of explanation, but a selected and preferred kind: those explanations that have most quickly and most frequently removed the feeling of something strange, new, unexperienced—the most habitual explanations.—The consequence: one way of positing causes increasingly predominates, concentrates itself into a system, and finally emerges as dominant—that is, simply excluding other causes and explanations.—The banker immediately thinks 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 are caused by beings hostile to us—evil spirits; the most famous case: mistaking hysterical women for witches. They are caused by actions that cannot be approved—the feeling of “sin,” of “sinfulness,” slipped beneath a physiological discomfort: reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself can always be found. They are caused as punishments, as payment for something we ought not to have done, ought not to have been—brazenly generalized by Schopenhauer into a proposition in which morality appears as what it is, the true poisoner and slanderer of life: “Every great pain, whether bodily or mental, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it.” Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2, 666. They are caused as consequences of ill-considered actions that turn out badly—the emotions, the senses posited as cause, as “guilt”; physiological emergencies interpreted, with the help of other emergencies, as “deserved.”—“Explanation” of pleasant general feelings. They are caused by trust in God. They are caused by awareness of good actions—the so-called “good conscience,” a physiological state sometimes deceptively like good digestion. They are caused by the happy outcome of undertakings—a naive false inference: a successful undertaking produces no pleasant general feelings at all in a hypochondriac, or in a Pascal. They are caused by faith, love, hope—the Christian virtues.—In truth, all these supposed explanations are subsequent states, translations, as it were, of feelings of pleasure or displeasure into a false dialect: one is in a condition to hope because the underlying physiological feeling is strong and rich again; one trusts God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives one repose.—Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error: in every single case cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effect of what is believed true; or a state of consciousness is confused with the causality of that state.

7 The error of free will.—Today we have no sympathy left for the concept of “free will”: we know all too well what it is—the most disreputable trick theologians have, devised to make humanity “responsible” in their sense, that is, dependent on them… Here I give only the psychology of all imputation of responsibility.—Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct that wants to punish and judge that does the seeking. Becoming has been stripped of its innocence when any state of being is traced back to will, to intentions, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will was essentially invented for the purpose of punishment, that is, of wanting to find someone guilty. The whole of the old psychology, the psychology of the will, has as its premise that its authors, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wished to create for themselves a right to impose punishments—or wished to create that right for God… Human beings were conceived as “free” so that they could be judged, so that they could be punished—so that they could become guilty: consequently every action had to be conceived as willed, the origin of every action as lying in consciousness—with which the most fundamental falsification in psychological matters had been made the principle of psychology itself… Today, when we have entered the opposite movement, when we immoralists in particular seek with all our strength to take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world again and cleanse psychology, history, nature, social institutions and sanctions of them, we see no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with “punishment” and “guilt” through the concept of a “moral world order.” Christianity is a metaphysics of the executioner…

8 What alone can our teaching be?—That no one gives human beings their qualities: neither God, nor society, nor their parents and ancestors, nor they themselves—the absurdity of this last, rejected idea was taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, perhaps already by Plato. No one is responsible for being here at all, for being constituted in this or that way, for being in these circumstances, in this environment. The fatality of a person’s nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that was and all that will be. A person is not the consequence of an intention of his own, of a will, of a purpose; no attempt is being made through him to attain an “ideal of humanity,” or an “ideal of happiness,” or an “ideal of morality”—it is absurd to try to shift his nature toward some purpose. We invented the concept of “purpose”: in reality, purpose is absent… We are necessary, we are a piece of fate, we belong to the whole, we are in the whole—there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole… But there is nothing outside the whole!—That no one is held responsible any longer, that the manner of being must not be traced back to a first cause, that the world is not a unity either as a sensorium or as “mind”: this alone is the great liberation—only thus is the innocence of becoming restored… The concept “God” has until now been the greatest objection to existence… We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: only thus do we redeem the world.—

1 The error of confusing cause and effect.—No error is more dangerous than confusing an effect with its cause. I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error is one of humanity’s oldest habits, and also one of its newest. Even among us it is treated as sacred: it goes by the names “religion” and “morality.” Every statement that religion and morality put forward contains it. Priests and moral lawmakers are the people who brought about this corruption of reason.—Here is an example. Everyone knows the famous Cornaro’s book. He recommends his meager diet as a recipe for a long and happy life—and a virtuous one too. Few books have been read so widely. Even now, many thousands of copies are printed in England every year. I have no doubt that hardly any book—the Bible excepted, as is only fair—has done as much harm or shortened as many lives as this well-meant curiosity. The reason is that it confuses an effect with its cause. The respectable Italian saw his diet as the cause of his long life. In fact, the condition that made a long life possible—his extremely slow metabolism and low energy use—was the cause of his meager diet. He was not free to eat little or much. His frugal eating was not a matter of “free will”: eating more made him sick. But anyone who is not a carp does not merely benefit from eating a proper amount: they need to. A scholar today, who rapidly uses up nervous energy, would ruin himself on Cornaro’s diet. Believe someone who has tried it.—

2 The most general formula behind every religion and morality says: “Do this and that, don’t do this and that—and you’ll be happy! Otherwise…” Every morality, every religion, is this command. I call it reason’s great original sin, its undying unreason. In my mouth, that formula turns into its opposite—the first example of my “revaluation of all values.” A person who has turned out well, a “happy” person, has to do certain things and instinctively avoids doing others. He brings the order that his body embodies into his relations with people and things. As a formula: his virtue is the result of his happiness… A long life and many descendants are not the reward for virtue. Rather, virtue itself is that slowing down of metabolism which brings, among other things, a long life and many descendants—in short, Cornaro’s way of living.—The Church and morality say: “A family line, a people, is ruined by vice and luxury.” My restored reason says: when a people is going to ruin, degenerating physically, vice and luxury follow from this. That means the need for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation, familiar to every exhausted body. This young man turns pale and withered before his time. His friends say: this or that disease is to blame. I say: the fact that he got sick, that he could not resist the disease, was already the result of an impoverished life, an inherited exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party is ruining itself with a mistake like that. My higher politics says: a party that makes mistakes like that is finished—it no longer has dependable instincts. Every mistake, in every sense, results from instincts breaking down, from the will falling apart. That almost defines what is bad. Everything good is instinct—and therefore easy, necessary, free. Strenuous effort is an objection. The god is a different type from the hero. In my language: light feet are the first sign of divinity.

3 The error of false causation.—People have always believed they knew what a cause was. But where did we get our knowledge—or, more exactly, our belief that we knew something here? From the realm of those famous “inner facts,” not one of which has so far proved to be a fact. We believed that we ourselves caused things when we willed. Here, at least, we thought we had caught causation in the act. Nor did anyone doubt that everything preceding an action, its causes, had to be sought in consciousness and would be found there if we looked—as “motives.” Otherwise, after all, we would not have been free to do it or responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? That the I causes the thought?… Of these three “inner facts,” which seemed to guarantee causation, the first and most convincing is the will as a cause. The idea of consciousness (“spirit”) as a cause, and later still the idea of the I (the “subject”) as a cause, came afterward. They came once causation by the will had been accepted as a given, as a fact of experience… Since then we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of any of this. The “inner world” is full of illusions and misleading lights: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, so it no longer explains anything either. It merely accompanies events, and it can also be absent. The so-called “motive”: another error. Merely something on the surface of consciousness, something accompanying the act that conceals what came before it rather than showing it. And the I, of all things! It has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words. It has completely stopped thinking, feeling, and willing!… What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all! All the supposed evidence from experience for them has gone to hell! That is what follows!—And we had made quite a misuse of that “experience.” On that basis we had created the world as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The oldest and longest-lasting psychology was at work here. It did nothing else. To it, everything that happened was an action, and every action resulted from a will. The world became a multitude of doers. A doer—a “subject”—was slipped underneath everything that happened. Human beings projected their three “inner facts,” the things they believed in most firmly—the will, the spirit, the I—out of themselves. They first drew the idea of being from the idea of the I. They declared that “things” existed in their own image, on the model of their idea of the I as a cause. Is it any wonder that later they only ever found in things what they had put into them?—The thing itself, to say it again, the idea of a thing, is merely a reflection of the belief in the I as a cause… And even your atom, gentlemen of mechanics and physics—how much error, how much leftover primitive psychology, still survives in your atom!—Not to mention the “thing in itself,” the metaphysicians’ horrible, shameful thing! The error of spirit as a cause confused with reality! And made the measure of reality! And called God!—

4 The error of imaginary causes.—Let’s start with dreams. A particular sensation—for example, one caused by a distant cannon shot—is afterward supplied with a cause. Often this is a whole little novel, with the dreamer himself as its main character. Meanwhile the sensation continues, like a kind of echo. It seems to wait until the drive to find a cause lets it come to the foreground—no longer as chance, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears as part of a causal sequence, with time apparently reversed. What comes later, the explanation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details that pass in a flash. The shot follows… What has happened? The images produced by a certain bodily state were mistaken for its cause.—In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings—every kind of blockage, pressure, tension, or explosion in the action and counteraction of our organs, and especially the state of the sympathetic nerve—set off our drive to find causes. We want a reason for feeling this way or that—for feeling bad or feeling good. It never satisfies us simply to establish the fact that we feel this way or that. We only admit this fact—become conscious of it—once we have given it some kind of explanation.—In such a case, memory goes to work without our knowing it. It brings up earlier states of the same kind and the causal interpretations that have grown attached to them—not what actually caused those states. Of course, memory also brings up the belief that the images, the accompanying processes in consciousness, were the causes. This is how we become used to a particular interpretation of causes. In truth, that habit obstructs and even rules out any investigation of the cause.

5 The psychological explanation.—Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar brings relief, reassurance, and satisfaction. It also gives a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings danger, uneasiness, and worry. Our first instinct is to get rid of these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. At bottom, we only want to get rid of oppressive ideas, so we are not very strict about how we get rid of them. The first idea that explains the unfamiliar as something familiar feels so good that we “take it for true.” Pleasure as proof (“strength” as proof) becomes the test of truth.—So the drive to find causes depends on fear and is stirred up by it. If at all possible, the question “Why?” is meant to provide not so much the cause for its own sake as a particular kind of cause—a reassuring cause, one that frees us and brings relief. The first result of this need is that we assume the cause is something already familiar, something experienced before, something recorded in memory. What is new, unexperienced, or strange is ruled out as a cause.—So we are not merely looking for a kind of explanation to serve as a cause. We are looking for a selected, preferred kind: the explanations that have most quickly and most often removed the feeling of strangeness, novelty, and inexperience—the most usual explanations.—The result: one way of assigning causes becomes more and more dominant, comes together into a system, and finally takes control. That means it simply rules out other causes and explanations.—The banker immediately thinks of “business,” the Christian of “sin,” the girl of her love.

6 The whole realm of morality and religion comes under this heading of imaginary causes.—“Explanation” of unpleasant general feelings. They are caused by beings that are hostile to us. Evil spirits: the most famous case is the mistaken belief that hysterical women were witches. They are caused by actions we cannot approve of. The feeling of “sin,” of “sinfulness,” is slipped underneath a physical discomfort: we can always find reasons to be unhappy with ourselves. They are explained as punishments, as payment for something we should not have done or should not have been. Schopenhauer shamelessly turned this into a general statement in which morality appears as what it is: the true poisoner and slanderer of life. “Every great pain, whether physical or mental, tells us what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it.” Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2, 666. They are explained as the results of thoughtless actions that end badly. The emotions and the senses are assumed to be the causes, the “guilty” parties. Physical distress is interpreted as “deserved” with the help of other kinds of distress.—“Explanation” of pleasant general feelings. They are caused by trust in God. They are caused by the awareness of good actions: the so-called “good conscience,” a physical state that sometimes looks so much like good digestion that one could mistake the two. They are caused by the successful outcome of our undertakings. A naive false inference: a successful undertaking certainly does not give a hypochondriac—or a Pascal—pleasant general feelings. They are caused by faith, love, and hope—the Christian virtues.—In truth, all these supposed explanations are states that follow from feelings of pleasure or displeasure, and are like translations of those feelings into a false dialect. We are able to hope because our basic physical feeling is strong and rich again. We trust God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives us peace.—Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology of error. In every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effect of what is believed to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with that state’s power to cause things.

7 The error of free will.—Today we have no sympathy left for the idea of “free will.” We know only too well what it is: the most disreputable trick theologians have, designed to make humanity “responsible” in their sense—that is, dependent on them… Here I am only giving the psychology behind all attempts to hold people responsible.—Wherever people look for responsibility, it is usually the instinct that wants to punish and judge that does the looking. The process of becoming is stripped of its innocence whenever being this way or that is traced back to a will, to intentions, to acts for which someone is responsible. The doctrine of the will was essentially invented for the purpose of punishment—that is, out of the desire to find someone guilty. The whole of the old psychology, the psychology of the will, rests on this premise: its creators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to give themselves a right to impose punishments—or to give God that right… People were imagined as “free” so that they could be judged and punished—so that they could become guilty. Consequently, every action had to be imagined as willed, and the origin of every action as lying in consciousness. This made the most fundamental falsification in psychology into the very principle of psychology… Today we have entered the opposite movement. We immoralists, in particular, are doing everything we can to remove the ideas of guilt and punishment from the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, social institutions, and sanctions of them. In our eyes, no one is more radically opposed to us than the theologians, who keep using the idea of a “moral world order” to infect the innocence of becoming with “punishment” and “guilt.” Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics…

8 What alone can our teaching be?—That no one gives human beings their qualities: not God, not society, not their parents and ancestors, and not they themselves. The nonsense of this last idea, which we reject here, was taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, and perhaps by Plato before him. No one is responsible for existing at all, for being constituted this way or that, for being in these circumstances, in this environment. The fate of a person’s being cannot be separated from the fate of everything that was and everything that will be. A person is not the result of any particular intention, will, or purpose. No attempt is being made through them to achieve an “ideal of humanity,” an “ideal of happiness,” or an “ideal of morality.” It is absurd to try to trace their being back to some purpose. We invented the idea of “purpose”: reality has no purpose… We are necessary, we are a piece of fate, we belong to the whole, we are in the whole. There is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or condemn our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, and condemning the whole… But there is nothing outside the whole!—That no one is held responsible anymore, that the way things are cannot be traced back to a first cause, that the world is not a unity either as a center of sensation or as “spirit”—this alone is the great liberation. Only this restores the innocence of becoming… Until now, the idea of “God” has been the greatest objection to existence… We deny God; we deny responsibility in God. Only through this do we free the world.—