Human, All Too Human 175causalities that drive it onward are "blind ," because they do not have any
objectives. They are not intentional, but if we know them, we can
employ them for our purposes. The meaning of religious and mystical
cults had been to influence nature in the medium of a spiritual context.
This connection is sundered once we introduce a scientific explanation
of nature. However, we are now in a position to use nature for our own
benefit by exploiting its laws.
Scientific civilization has gready facilitated our lives on a practical
level, as Nietzsche acknowledged. It can also ease our minds in matters
of morality. To whatever degree the knowledge of natural causality
waxes, the sphere of causalities associated with fantasy and morality
wanes accordingly. If, for example, lightning can be traced to meteoro-
logical conditions, it no longer weighs on our conscience as divine pun-
ishment. With every discovery of natural causalities in matters of
morality, "a piece of anxiety and constraint [vanishes] from the world"
(3,24; D §16).
The grand disenchantment of nature by means of scientific knowl-
edge does away with the intentionality of a world that has a meaningful
genesis and culmination and a goal-oriented process in the middle and
reduces it to a universe of chains of causality that clash and become
entangled and produce new causalities time and again. Yet another sanc-
tuary of religious and metaphysical thought disappears as well, namely
the idea of human freedom. When causality is discovered in external
nature and handled more and more successfully, it is inevitable that this
principle of causality ultimately also reaches the knowledgeable author-
ity itself. Mind and body once constituted a whole that was infused with
spirit. Now the other extreme has been reached, and the whole is infused
with nature. Tn the past, nature was an embodied spirit, but now the spir-
it is nothing but a sublime form of nature. On the path from spiritual-
ization to naturalization, the idea of freedom falls by the wayside, and,
along with it, the accountability for actions and responsibility we associ-
ate with freedom.
Under the heading "The Fable of Intelligible Freedom," Nietzsche