Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
A Criticism of the Words: Improvement, Perfecting, Elevation§394 The universal deception and cheating in the realm of so-called moral improvement –. We do not believe that one man can be another if he is not that other already — that is to say, if he is not, as often happens, an accretion of personalities or at least of parts of persons. In this case it is possible to draw another set of actions from him into the foreground and to drive back “the older man” –. The man’s aspect is altered, but not his actual nature –. It is but the merest factum brutum that anyone should cease from performing certain actions and the fact allows of the most varied interpretations. Neither does it always follow from this that the habit of performing a certain action is entirely arrested, nor that the reasons for that action are dissipated. He whose destiny and abilities make him a criminal never unlearns anything, but is continually adding to his store of knowledge: and long abstinence acts as a sort of tonic for his talent —
Certainly, as far as society is concerned, the only interesting fact is that someone has ceased from performing certain actions; and to this end society will often raise a man out of those circumstances which make him able to perform those actions: this is obviously a wiser course than that of trying to break his destiny and his particular nature. The Church, which has done nothing except to take the place of and to appropriate, the philosophic treasures of antiquity, starting out from another standpoint and wishing to secure a “soul” or the “salvation” of a soul, believes in the expiatory power of punishment, as also in the obliterating power of forgiveness: both of which supposed processes are deceptions due to religious prejudice; punishment expiates nothing, forgiveness obliterates nothing; what is done cannot be undone. Because someone forgets something it by no means proves that something has been wiped out —
An action leads to certain consequences, both in a man and outside him and it matters not whether it has met with punishment, or whether it has been “expiated”, “forgiven”, or “wiped clean”, it matters not even if the Church meanwhile canonises the man who performed it. The Church believes in things that do not exist, it believes in “Souls”; it believes in “influences” that do not exist — in divine influences; it believes in states that do not exist, in sin, redemption and spiritual salvation: in all things it stops at the surface and is satisfied with signs, attitudes, words, to which it lends an arbitrary interpretation. It possesses a method of counterfeit psychology which is thought out quite systematically.