1054 FRIEDRICHNIETZSCHE
degenerates physiologically, then license and luxury followfrom this (namely, the
craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation, as every exhausted nature
knows it). This young man turns pale early and wilts; his friends say; that is due to this
or that disease. I say: that he became diseased, that he did not resist the disease, was
already the effect of art impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper
reader says: this party destroys itself by making such a mistake. My higherpolitics
says: a party which makes such mistakes has reached its end; it has lost its sureness of
instinct. Every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration of instinct, of
the disintegration of the will: one could almost define what is bad in this way. All that
is good is instinct—and hence easy, necessary, free. Laboriousness is an objection; the
god is typically different from the hero. (In my language light feet are the first attribute
of divinity.)
[3] The error of a false causality.People have believed at all times that they knew
what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge—or more precisely, our faith
that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous “inner facts,” of which not
a single one has so far proved to be factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act
of willing: we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act. Nor did one
doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness
and would be found there once sought—as “motives”: else one would not have been
free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? that
the ego causes the thought?
Of these three “inward facts” which seem to guarantee causality, the first and
most persuasive is that of the will as cause. The conception of a consciousness (“spirit”)
as a cause, and later also that of the ego as cause (the “subject”), are only afterbirths:
first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical.
Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all
this. The “inner world” is full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps: the will is one of
them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either—it
merely accompanies vents; it can also be absent. The so-called motive:another error.
Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is
more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for
the ego!That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to
think, feel, or will!
What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the
allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil. That is what follows! And
what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this “empirical, evidence”; we createdthe
world on this basis as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most
ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that
happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it
a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a “subject”) was slipped under all that happened. It was
out of himself that man projected his three “inner facts”—that in which he believed
most firmly, the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from, the
concept of the ego; he posited “things” as “being,” in his image, in accordance with his
concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found in things only
that which he had put into them.The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of
thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear
mechanists and physicists—how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is still