be the expression of completely free or constrained life?—Maybe its biological value is expressed in this way....
If, then, an action can be judged neither in the light of its origin, nor its results, nor its accompaniments in consciousness, then its value must be x unknown....
292.
It amounts to a denaturalisation of morality, to separate an action from a man; to direct hatred or contempt against "sin"; to believe that there are actions which are good or bad in themselves.
The re-establishment of "Nature": an action in itself is quite devoid of value; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same "crime" may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).
293.
The concept "reprehensible action" presents us with some difficulties. Nothing in all that happens can be reprehensible in itself: one would not dare to eliminate it completely; for everything is so bound up with everything else, that to exclude one part would mean to exclude the whole.
A reprehensible action, therefore, would mean a reprehensible world as a whole....
And even then, in a reprehensible world even reprehending would be reprehensible.... And the consequence of an attitude of mind that condemns everything, would be the affirmation of everything in practice.... If Becoming is a huge ring, everything that forms a part of it is of equal value, is eternal and necessary.—In all correlations of yea and nay, of preference and rejection, love and hate, all that is expressed is a certain point of view, peculiar to the interests of a certain type of living organism: everything that lives says yea by the very fact of its existence.
294.
Criticism of the subjective feelings of value.—Conscience. Formerly people argued: conscience condemns this action, therefore this action is reprehensible. But, as a matter of fact, conscience condemns an action because that action has been condemned for a long period of time: all conscience does is to imitate. It does not create values. That which first led to the condemnation of certain actions, was not conscience: but the knowledge of (or the prejudice against) its consequences.... The approbation of conscience, the feeling of well-being, of "inner peace," is of the same order of emotions as the artist's joy over his work—it proves nothing.... Self-contentment proves no more in favour of that which gives rise to it, than its absence can prove anything against the value of the thing which fails to give rise to it. We are far too ignorant to be able to judge of the value of our actions: in this respect we lack the ability to regard things objectively. Even when we condemn an action, we do not do so as judges, but as adversaries.... When noble sentiments accompany an action, they prove nothing in its favour: an artist may present us with an absolutely insignificant thing, though he be in the throes of the most exalted pathos during its production. It were wiser to regard these sentiments as misleading: they actually beguile our eye and our power, away from criticism, from caution and from suspicion, and the result often is that we make fools of ourselves ... they actually make fools of us.
295.
We are heirs to the conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years: in these two practices lie perhaps our longest efforts at becoming perfect, our mastery, and certainly our subtlety; we have affiliated natural propensities with a heavy conscience.
An attempt to produce an entirely opposite state of affairs would be possible: that is to say, to affiliate all desires of a beyond, all sympathy with things which are opposed to the senses, the intellect, and nature—in fact, all the ideals that have existed hitherto (which were all anti-worldly), with a heavy conscience.
296.
The great crimes in psychology:—
(1) That all pain and unhappiness should have been falsified by being associated with what is wrong (guilt). (Thus pain was robbed of its innocence.)
(2) That all strong emotions (wantonness, voluptuousness, triumph, pride, audacity, knowledge, assurance, and happiness in itself) were branded as sinful, as seductive, and as suspicious.
(3) That feelings of weakness, inner acts of cowardice, lack of personal courage, should have decked themselves in the most beautiful words, and have been taught as desirable in the highest degree.
(4) That greatness in man should have been given the meaning of disinterestedness, self-sacrifice for another's good, for other people; that even in the scientist and the artist, the elimination of the individual personality is presented as the cause of the greatest knowledge and ability.
(5) That love should have been twisted round to mean submission (and altruism), whereas it is in reality an act of appropriation or of bestowal, resulting in the last case from a superabundance in the wealth of a given personality. Only the wholest people can love; the disinterested ones, the "objective" ones, are the worst lovers (just ask the girls!). This principle also applies to the love of God or of the "home country": a man must be able to rely absolutely upon himself. (Egotism may be regarded as the pre-eminence of the ego, altruism as the pre-eminence of others.)
(6) Life regarded as a punishment (happiness as a means of seduction); the passions regarded as devilish; confidence in one's self as godless.
The whole of psychology is a psychology of obstacles, a sort of barricade built out of fear; on the one hand we find the masses (the botched and bungled, the mediocre) defending themselves, by means of it, against the strong (and finally destroying them in their growth ...); on the other hand, we find all the instincts with which these classes are best able to prosper, sanctified and alone held in honour by them. Let anyone examine the Jewish priesthood.
297.
The vestiges of the depreciation of Nature through moral transcendence: The value of disinterestedness, the cult of altruism; the belief in a reward in the play of natural consequences; the belief in "goodness" and in genius itself, as if the one, like the other, were the result of disinterestedness; the continuation of the Church's sanction of the life of the citizen; the absolutely deliberate misunderstanding of history (as a means of educating up to morality) or pessimism in the attitude taken up towards history (the latter is just as much a result of the depreciation of Nature, as is that pseudo-justification of history, that refusal to see history as the pessimist sees it).
298.
"Morality for its own sake"—this is an important step in the denaturalisation of morals: in itself it appears as a final value. In this phase religion has generally become saturated with it: as, for instance, in the case of Judaism. It likewise goes through a phase in which it separates itself from religion, and in which no God is "moral" enough for it: it then prefers the impersonal ideal.... This is how the case stands at present.
"Art for Art's sake": this is a similarly dangerous principle: by this means a false contrast is lent to things—it culminates in the slander of reality ("idealising" into the hateful). When an ideal is severed from reality, the latter is debased, impoverished, and calumniated. "Beauty for Beauty's sake," "Truth for Truth's sake," "Goodness for Goodness' sake"—these are three forms of the evil eye for reality.
Art, knowledge, and morality are means: instead of recognising a life-promoting tendency in them, they have been
