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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters22
You will already have guessed what went on with all this and behind all this: that will to self-torment, that repressed cruelty of animal man pushed inward and forced back into himself, imprisoned in the "state" to make him tame, who invented bad conscience in order to lacerate himself, after the more natural discharge of this will to inflict pain had been blocked, this man with a bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his self-torment into something most horrifying - hard and sharp. Guilt towards God: this idea becomes his instrument of torture.
He sees in "God" the ultimate contrast he is capable of discovering to his real and indissoluble animal instincts. He interprets these very animal instincts as a crime against God (as enmity, rebellion, revolt, against the "master," the "father," the ur-ancestor and beginning of the world). He grows tense with the contradiction of "God" and "devil," from himself he hurls every denial which he says to himself, his nature, his naturalness, the reality of his being as an affirmative yes, as something existing, as living, as real, as God, as the blessedness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as something beyond him, as eternity, as perpetual torment, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond all measure.
In this mental cruelty there is a kind of insanity of the will, which simply has no equal: the human will finding him so guilty and reprehensible that there is no atonement, his will to imagine himself punished but in such a way that the punishment can never be adequate for his crime, his will to infect and poison the most fundamental basis of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut himself off once and for all from any exit out of this labyrinth of "fixed ideas," his will to erect an ideal (that of the "holy God") in order to be tangibly certain of his own absolute worthlessness when confronted with it. Oh this insane, sad beast man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought breaks from him as soon as he is prevented, if only a little, from being a beast in deed! . . .
All this is excessively interesting, but there`s also a black, gloomy, unnerving sadness about it, so that man must forcefully hold himself back from gazing too long into these abysses. Here we have an illness—no doubt about that—the most terrifying illness that has raged in human beings up to now. And anyone who can still hear (but nowadays people no longer have the ears for this) how in this night of torment and insanity the cry of love has resounded, the cry of the most yearning delight, of redemption through love, turns away, seized by an invincible horror. . . In human beings there is so much that is terrible! . . . For too long the world has been a lunatic asylum! . . .
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