On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford World's Classics) by Nietzsche Friedrich & Douglas Smith

Author:Nietzsche, Friedrich & Douglas Smith [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Exactly what has happened here underneath all this will already be clear: the will to self-torture, that downtrodden cruelty of the internalized animal man who has been chased back into himself, of the man locked up in the ‘state’ in order to be tamed, the man who invented bad conscience in order to inflict pain on himself after the more natural outlet for this desire to inflict pain was obstructed—this man of bad conscience has assumed control of the religious presupposition in order to carry his self-punishment to the most horrific pitch of harsh intensity. Indebtedness towards God: this thought becomes for him an instrument of torture. In ‘God’ he apprehends the ultimate opposing principle to his actual and irredeemable animal instincts, he himself reinterprets these animal instincts as a debt towards God (as hostility, rebellion, revolt against the ‘master’, the ‘father’, the original founding father and beginning of the world), he stretches himself on the rack of the contradiction between ‘God’ and ‘Devil’, he expels from himself every negation of himself, of nature, the natural, the reality of his being, in the form of an affirmation, as something which exists, as incarnate, real, as God, as God’s holiness, as God’s judgement, as God’s punishment, as the beyond, as eternity, as suffering without end, as hell, as immeasurability of punishment and guilt. This represents a kind of madness of the will in psychic cruelty which simply knows no equal: the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a point beyond the possibility of atonement, his will to think himself punished without the punishment ever being commensurate with his guilt, his will to infect and poison things to their very depths with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape from this labyrinth of idées fixes, his will to establish an ideal—that of the ‘holy God’—, and to feel the palpable certainty of his absolute unworthiness with respect to that ideal. Oh this insane, sad beast, man! What things occur to him, what unnatural things, what absurd paroxysms, what bestiality of the idea breaks out immediately if he is even as much as slightly hindered from being a beast of the deed!… This is all extremely interesting, but also of such black, sombre, unnerving sadness that one must forcibly restrain oneself from gazing into these abysses for too long. There is sickness here, without doubt, the most fearful sickness which up until now has raged in man—and anyone who can still hear (although nowadays no one has the ears to hear it any more!—) how in this night of torment and absurdity the cry of love, the scream of the most yearning delight, of redemption in love has resounded, he turns away, seized by an uncontrollable horror… In man there is so much that is horrific!… The earth has been a madhouse for too long already!…

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