Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

The Four Great Errors

8 What alone can our teaching be? – That no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself ( – the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as ‘intelligible freedom’, by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him). No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an ‘ideal of man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality’ – it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking .… One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole.… But nothing exists apart from the whole! – That no one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit’, this alone is the great liberation – thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored.… The concept ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence.… We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.