Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,
"The Four Great Errors," section 8.
What alone can be our doctrine?
That no one gives man his qualities—neither
God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors,
nor he himself.
(The nonsense of the last idea was taught
as “intelligible freedom” by Kant—perhaps
by Plato already.)
No one is responsible for man’s being there
at all, for his being such-and-such, or for
his being in these circumstances or in this
environment.
The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled
from the fatality of all that has been and
will be.
Man is not the effect of some special purpose,
of a will, an end; nor is he the object of
an attempt to attain an “ideal of humanity”
or an “ideal of happiness” or an “ideal
of morality.”
It is absurd to wish to devolve one’s essence
on some end or other.
We have invented the concept of “end”:
in reality there is no end.
One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness,
one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole;
there is nothing which could judge, measure,
compare, or sentence our being, for that would
mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing
the whole.
But there is nothing besides the whole.
That nobody is held responsible any longer,
that the mode of being may not be traced back
to a causa prima, that the world does not
form a unity either as a sensorium or as “spirit"—that
alone is the great liberation; with this alone
is the innocence of becoming restored.
The concept of “God” was until now the
greatest objection to existence.
We deny God, we deny the responsibility in
God: only thereby do we redeem the world.
