Observations placeholder
Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morals - Too long the earth has been a madhouse
Identifier
013540
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morals
Guilt ‘before God’! This thought becomes an instrument of torture... He apprehends in ‘God’ the ultimate antithesis of his own ineluctable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as a form of guilt before ‘God’ – as hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the “Lord” …. He stretches himself upon the contradiction ‘God’ and ‘Devil’.
In this psychical cruelty there resides a madness of the will which is absolutely unexampled; the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for. His will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt so as to cut off once and for all his own exit from this labyrinth of fixed ideas; his will to erect an ideal – that of the ‘Holy God’ – and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness.
Oh this insane, pathetic beast – man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts as soon as he is prevented just a little from being a beast in deed!
All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man –
Too long the earth has been a madhouse
The source of the experience
Nietzsche, Friedrich WilhelmConcepts, symbols and science items
Symbols
Science Items
Activities and commonsteps
Activities
Overloads
Lead poisoningLoneliness and isolation
Suppressions
Beauty, art and musicBeing left handed
Opium
Suppressing memory