direct excerpt from Nietzsche's The Gay Science
335
Hurray for physics!----How many people really understand how to observe? And among the few who do understand it--how many observes themselves? "One is always furthest from oneself"--all who try the reins know this, to their own discontent. And the saying, "Knowing yourself," in the mouth of a god and spoken to human beings, is virtually malicious.
But nothing better indicates that self-observation is hopeless than the way in which almost everyone speaks about the essence of a moral action--this quick, willing, convinced, talkative way, with its look, its smile, its likeable eagerness! One seems to want to say to you, "But my dear friend, that's exactly my specialty! You're asking the one who's qualified to answer; it so happens that there's nothing I'm wiser about than this. So: when a human being judges, 'that's what's right', concludes, 'therefore it must happen!' and then does what has thus been recognized as right and designated as necessary--that's when the essence of the action is moral!"
But, my friend, you are telling me about three actions there rather than one. Judging--for instance, "That's what's right"--is also an action; can't judgments already be made in both a moral and in an immoral way? Why do you take this, and precisely this, to be right?
"Because my conscience tells me so. The conscience never speaks immorally; in fact it is what first determines what should be moral!"
But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And how much right do you have to consider such a judgment true and non-deceptive? As regards this faith--is there no conscience anymore? Don't you know anything about an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your conscience"? Your judgment "that's what's right" has a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, experiences, and lack of experience. "How did this judgment arise?," you must ask, and still further, "What really drives me to lend an ear to it?" Your can lend an ear to its commands like a soldier responding to the command of his officer. Or like a woman who loves the one who is commanding. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dummy who follows because he has nothing to say against doing so. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can lend an ear to your conscience--that you perceive something as right, in other words--may be caused by the fact that you never reflected on yourself, and are blindly accepting what has been designated as right to you since childhood. The cause may also be that what you call your duty has brought you bread and honors up to now--it counts as "right" for you because it seems to you to be your "condition of existence" (and that you have a right to existence appears irrefutable to you!). The steadiness of your moral judgment could still turn out to be a proof precisely of your personal misery or impersonality; your "moral strength" could have its source in your stubbornness--or in your inability to catch sight of new ideals! And, briefly put: if you had thought more subtly, observed better, and learned more, you would at all events no longer call this "duty" and "conscience" of yours duty and conscience. The insight into how, in each case, moral judgments have arisen to begin with would spoil these lofty words for you--just as other lofty words such as "sin," "salvation of the soul," and "redemption" have already been spoiled for you.
And don't talk to me now about the categorical imperative, my friend! This term tickles my ear and I have to laugh, despite your ever so earnest presence. It makes me think of old Kant, who, as punishment for having stolen away with "the thing in itself"--another very laughable business!--had the "categorical imperative" steal upon him, and with it in his heart, strayed back to "God," "soul," "freedom," and "immortality," like a fox that strays back into his cage--and it was his strength and cleverness that had broken open this cage!--What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This "steadiness" of your so-called moral judgment? This "absoluteness" of the feeling, "all others must judge as I do in this case?" Admire instead your selfishness in this! And the blindness, pettiness, and unpretentiousness of your selfishness! For it is selfishness to perceive one's own judgment as a universal law. And it is a blind, petty, and unpretentious sefishness to boot, because it betrays the fact that you have not yet discoverd yourself, have not yet created your own, ownmost ideal for yourself--for this could never be the ideal of another, not to mention of all, all!
All who still judge, "everyone would have to act this way in this case," have not yet progressed five steps in self-knowledge. Otherwise they would know that identical actions neither exist nor can exist--that every action that has been done, was done in a completely unique and irretrievable way, and that the same will hold for every future action; that all prescriptions for action relate only to the crass exterior (even the most interior and sublt prescriptions of all moralities up to now); that with these prescriptions, we may well attain an appearance of sameness, but only an appearance; that every action, whether you look into it or look back at it, is and remains an impenetrable thing; that our opinions about "good," "noble," "great," can never be proved by our actions, because every action is unknowable; that certainly our opinions, valuations, and tabes of goods are among the most powerful gears in teh clockwork of our actions, but that in every particular case the law of their mechanism remains unprovable.
Let us confine ourselves, then, to purifying our opinions and valuations, and to creating our own new tables of goods--but we no longer want to brood over the "moral value of our actions!" Yes, my friends! As regards all tthe moral blather of some people about others, it's time to feel sick. Sitting in moral judgment should be contrary to our taste! Let's leave this blather and this bad taste to those who have nothing else to do except drag the past a bit farther through time, and who themselves are never the present--in other words, the many, the majority! We, however, want to become who we are--the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves the law, those who create themselves! And for this, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world; we must be physicists so that we can be creators in this sense--while up to now, all valuations and ideals were built on ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it. And thus: hurray for physics! And a still bigger cheer for what forces us to it--our honesty!
Hurray for physics!----How many people really understand how to observe? And among the few who do understand it--how many observes themselves? "One is always furthest from oneself"--all who try the reins know this, to their own discontent. And the saying, "Knowing yourself," in the mouth of a god and spoken to human beings, is virtually malicious.
But nothing better indicates that self-observation is hopeless than the way in which almost everyone speaks about the essence of a moral action--this quick, willing, convinced, talkative way, with its look, its smile, its likeable eagerness! One seems to want to say to you, "But my dear friend, that's exactly my specialty! You're asking the one who's qualified to answer; it so happens that there's nothing I'm wiser about than this. So: when a human being judges, 'that's what's right', concludes, 'therefore it must happen!' and then does what has thus been recognized as right and designated as necessary--that's when the essence of the action is moral!"
But, my friend, you are telling me about three actions there rather than one. Judging--for instance, "That's what's right"--is also an action; can't judgments already be made in both a moral and in an immoral way? Why do you take this, and precisely this, to be right?
"Because my conscience tells me so. The conscience never speaks immorally; in fact it is what first determines what should be moral!"
But why do you listen to the voice of your conscience? And how much right do you have to consider such a judgment true and non-deceptive? As regards this faith--is there no conscience anymore? Don't you know anything about an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your conscience"? Your judgment "that's what's right" has a prehistory in your drives, inclinations, experiences, and lack of experience. "How did this judgment arise?," you must ask, and still further, "What really drives me to lend an ear to it?" Your can lend an ear to its commands like a soldier responding to the command of his officer. Or like a woman who loves the one who is commanding. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dummy who follows because he has nothing to say against doing so. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can lend an ear to your conscience--that you perceive something as right, in other words--may be caused by the fact that you never reflected on yourself, and are blindly accepting what has been designated as right to you since childhood. The cause may also be that what you call your duty has brought you bread and honors up to now--it counts as "right" for you because it seems to you to be your "condition of existence" (and that you have a right to existence appears irrefutable to you!). The steadiness of your moral judgment could still turn out to be a proof precisely of your personal misery or impersonality; your "moral strength" could have its source in your stubbornness--or in your inability to catch sight of new ideals! And, briefly put: if you had thought more subtly, observed better, and learned more, you would at all events no longer call this "duty" and "conscience" of yours duty and conscience. The insight into how, in each case, moral judgments have arisen to begin with would spoil these lofty words for you--just as other lofty words such as "sin," "salvation of the soul," and "redemption" have already been spoiled for you.
And don't talk to me now about the categorical imperative, my friend! This term tickles my ear and I have to laugh, despite your ever so earnest presence. It makes me think of old Kant, who, as punishment for having stolen away with "the thing in itself"--another very laughable business!--had the "categorical imperative" steal upon him, and with it in his heart, strayed back to "God," "soul," "freedom," and "immortality," like a fox that strays back into his cage--and it was his strength and cleverness that had broken open this cage!--What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This "steadiness" of your so-called moral judgment? This "absoluteness" of the feeling, "all others must judge as I do in this case?" Admire instead your selfishness in this! And the blindness, pettiness, and unpretentiousness of your selfishness! For it is selfishness to perceive one's own judgment as a universal law. And it is a blind, petty, and unpretentious sefishness to boot, because it betrays the fact that you have not yet discoverd yourself, have not yet created your own, ownmost ideal for yourself--for this could never be the ideal of another, not to mention of all, all!
All who still judge, "everyone would have to act this way in this case," have not yet progressed five steps in self-knowledge. Otherwise they would know that identical actions neither exist nor can exist--that every action that has been done, was done in a completely unique and irretrievable way, and that the same will hold for every future action; that all prescriptions for action relate only to the crass exterior (even the most interior and sublt prescriptions of all moralities up to now); that with these prescriptions, we may well attain an appearance of sameness, but only an appearance; that every action, whether you look into it or look back at it, is and remains an impenetrable thing; that our opinions about "good," "noble," "great," can never be proved by our actions, because every action is unknowable; that certainly our opinions, valuations, and tabes of goods are among the most powerful gears in teh clockwork of our actions, but that in every particular case the law of their mechanism remains unprovable.
Let us confine ourselves, then, to purifying our opinions and valuations, and to creating our own new tables of goods--but we no longer want to brood over the "moral value of our actions!" Yes, my friends! As regards all tthe moral blather of some people about others, it's time to feel sick. Sitting in moral judgment should be contrary to our taste! Let's leave this blather and this bad taste to those who have nothing else to do except drag the past a bit farther through time, and who themselves are never the present--in other words, the many, the majority! We, however, want to become who we are--the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves the law, those who create themselves! And for this, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything lawful and necessary in the world; we must be physicists so that we can be creators in this sense--while up to now, all valuations and ideals were built on ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it. And thus: hurray for physics! And a still bigger cheer for what forces us to it--our honesty!