14.
We have unlearned something. We have be come more modest in every
way. We no longer derive man from the “spirit,” from the
“god-head”; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We
regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest;
one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we
guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here:
that man is the great second thought in the process of organic evolution.
He is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many
other animals, all at similar stages of development... And even when we say
that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched
of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously
from his instincts—though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most
interesting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who
first had the really admirable daring to describe them as
machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward
proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart,
as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent
to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man,
as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called “free
will”; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer
describes anything that we can understand. The old word “will”
now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows
inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious
stimuli—the will no longer “acts,” or “moves.” . . .
Formerly it was thought that man's consciousness, his “spirit,”
offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected,
he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with
earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil—then only the
important part of him, the “pure spirit,” would remain. Here
again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or “the
spirit,” appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the
organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an
affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily—we deny that
anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. The “pure
spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system
and the senses, the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest
is miscalculation—that is all! . . .