Chapter 24 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (7)

However, it is by no means my intention in presenting these thoughts to help our pessimists add water to their out-of-tuned, rattling, life-weary millstones; When their cruelty was shamed, life on earth was happier than it is today with the pessimists.As people's stigma grows, the sky above their heads grows darker.The weary gaze of the pessimist, the skepticism of the mystery of life, the cold denial of the weary of life—these are not the hallmarks of man's most vicious ages.They are just beginning to appear, they are marsh plants, and there are marshes for them, they belong to the marsh—I mean the morbid softening and moralizing tendency, thanks to which the animal "man" has finally learned Shame on all his instincts.On the way to becoming an "angel" (I don't want to use a harsher word here) man has adjusted his rotten stomach and covered tongue, which made him not only loathe the happiness and innocence of animals, but also Life itself was repulsive, and sometimes he even covered his nose to himself, and joined Pope Innocent III in a discordant catalog of disgusting things: "Unclean offspring, disgusting upbringing in the mother's body, human The decay of the material substance on which it grows, the stench of saliva, piss, human excrement, etc." Today, pain is always used naturally as the first argument against existence, and always raises the most important question for existence. Doubt, which reminds us of times when people made contrary value judgments.People then did not want to shy away from suffering, on the contrary, they saw in it a strange fascination, a real bait for life.Perhaps at that time the pain was not as severe as it is today—I say this for the comfort of the delicate—at least one physician who treated a Negro patient with a severe internal Desperate the best-built Europeans, but the negroes don't care.In fact, when we count the first ten thousand, or perhaps the first tens of millions of over-educated people, the curve of the human capacity to tolerate pain miraculously drops off.I believe that the suffering of all animals hitherto surveyed by scales in search of scientific answers is trivial compared with that endured by a hysterical wit in one night.Perhaps there is still a possibility now: that is, the cruel desire does not necessarily disappear completely, just like the pain intensified today, this desire only needs to be added with some ideal and subtle ingredients, that is, that it must, when it appears, be translated into fanciful and spiritual languages, and be clothed with names so unimaginable that even the softest and most hypocritical consciences would doubt it (one name is "tragic sympathy"). ", another name is "Misery Nostalgia").It is not pain itself but its senselessness that rises against pain, but neither to Christ who interprets pain as the whole mysterious mechanism of salvation, nor to those who are accustomed to understand all suffering from the point of view of the spectator, or of the pain-maker For the naive ancient people, a kind of unnecessary pain does not exist at all.Having created in the world, or rather negated, that hidden, unrevealed, unverifiable pain, it was almost necessary to discover the gods, all intermediaries between the noble and the base, simply In other words, to discover something that is also hidden, that is also in the shadows, and that does not easily miss an interesting tragedy.By virtue of this discovery, life was then and has been understood as a creation; life itself was justified, and so was its "misfortune."New discoveries may be needed now (such as seeing life as a puzzle, as an epistemological problem). "Any misfortune that pleases a god is justified".Is this the ancient emotional logic? — Seriously, is this just ancient emotional logic?The gods are conceived as lovers of cruel drama - oh!Just look at Calvin and Luther to see how far this ancient imagination has stretched in our European humanity!In any case, the Greeks certainly could not have presented their gods with a more suitable ingredient for blessing than to take pleasure in cruelty.Why then did Homer make his gods despise man's fate?Besides, what was the point of the Trojan War and similarly tragic succubi?There is no doubt that for the gods, this is a comedy, and because the poet has made more artistic creations about "gods" in epics than anyone else, the poet himself must have thought it was a comedy... But later The Greek moral philosophers, on the other hand, held that the gods also looked up to moral questions, to heroism and the self-torture of the virtuous: "Heracles on a mission" came on stage, and he knew it, because there was no audience The moral behavior of actors is unthinkable for a nation of actors.Wasn't this invention, made at the time chiefly for Europe, this philosophical invention of "free will," of the absolute spontaneity of man's good and evil, so presumptuous and so dangerous, in order first of all to prove that God is to man Is his interest in human virtues inexhaustible?In this secular arena it has never been allowed to develop something truly new, to unearth truly unheard-of contradictions, realities, catastrophes: only God can foresee this world completely governed by determinism, so God is quick to understand it. Tired - so those philosophers who are friends of the gods have good reason not to expect their gods to govern such a deterministic world!The ancient world was essentially a public, open world, and the whole of the ancient world was filled with tenderness for the "spectator," and drama and celebration could never be excluded when thinking of happiness—we have already said that even in the practice of grand Punishment is also festive! ...