Thought Falsifies Reality - NIETZSCHE’S FOUR GREAT ERRORS

if I were to suggest a use for philosophy I would argue that perhaps its best use is as a tool for uprooting weeds let's assume for a moment that the psyche the mind is something like a patch of Earth and that within our minds we have all sorts of plants that are growing in there and uh you know where the germs for these plants come from it may not always be obvious much that's within the Mind remains deep beneath the soil beneath the surface of our Consciousness all of us would like to imagine that at

the very least we are competent Gardeners of our own mental soil and that only those beliefs and opinions and sentiments which we planted there and that we nourish only those are allowed to grow there but the reality is perhaps unfortunately that the ecosystem of the mind is not so conscious ly planned as we'd like to imagine it all sorts of invasive species make their way into the psyche and our minds are cross-pollinated so to speak with uh all the other garden plots around us all those other individuals and their beliefs and their opinions things were

planted in us before we were born or before we were old enough to have any understanding of what was being planted in short most of us walk around around with the ideas of other people in our heads and while this certainly doesn't mean that everything we receive from our culture and from our upbringing is negative it does mean that it is a somewhat natural inclination for human beings to passively or even unconsciously accept any number of what we might call Common Sense Notions uh here in modernity we are more or less comfortable with admitting that

this sort of passive receipt of ideas occurs when it comes to for example moral judgments it's easy enough to see how a social animal such as a human being would naturally mimic the moral beliefs of other human beings around them to whatever degree and whatever you think about morality I would say most people are on board with that idea but this doesn't stop with morality Suppose there are prejudices with even deeper Roots suppose these prejudices are not simply moral or that they don't only concern themselves with human behavior and the social mores suppose that we

have prejudices that constitute a kind of received wisdom as concerns the most basic facts of reality that when it comes to not just how to act but the nature of reality itself we are operating based on a a series of beliefs that we've simply passively accepted philosophy Finds Its use here it's an activity in disabusing ourselves from believing in truths that we've received as common sense wisdom with no other justification beyond that simple fact philosophy in some sense begins when we start to take note of the ways in which even the most mundane assertions and

statements of opinion contain Within them metaphysical beliefs and that these metaphysical beliefs have simply been allowed to grow within your garden without you even taking note of it now suppose that among such received beliefs that you possess are included beliefs that are in fact errors mistakes perhaps owing to an inherent flaw in human psychology or whatever the case may be and that nevertheless such a mistake has simply been allowed to propagate or even been called self-evident this is what we would call a weed we could in fact characterize the various great philosophers According to which

weeds they set themselves the task of uprooting so with Socrates the unquestioned way of life of the Athenians set by religion and tradition deart the Prejudice that the external world and our perception of it can simply be taken for granted rouso the faith that That civilization has improved mankind Hegel that things are things in themselves separable from the things to which they are related and so on and so forth we've defined all these philosophers by what they're attacking right in some sense philosophy always begins with an attack on a view that the philosopher has realized

to be nothing more than an assumption an unquestionable assumption because it's assumed by so many as we all know by now Fredick n was a prodigious critic and if we are to say that philosophy begins at this point of attack you'd also have to say few philosophized as hard as n did he never declared peace his critique of modern thought begins in his first book and it continues through to the very end his targets are numerous among the assumptions that he attempted to weed out are well morality itself or the notion of a true World

an intelligible World Behind the senses an intuition that begins in philosophy but becomes passively accepted through religion n also attempts to uproot nihilism or World weariness sentiments that n believed were suffused throughout modern culture already these are sort of like Titanic monstrous weeds that n has decided to wrestle with today we're going to take take a look at one of those critical passages in nche which is in Twilight of Idols many of the sections contained in Twilight of Idols are nich's attempts to summarize or condense ideas that he'd written about for over a decade by

this point this section is no different it is called the four Great errors I've discussed this section A long time ago on the podcast in the episode on Free Will and I think it's been brought up in one or two other episodes over the years but this passage is important enough on its own to Warrant its own discussion it was relevant to our discussion on free will because the the four Great errors uh is the most significant passage for comprehending n's view on that subject above pretty much all other passages in nich's Corpus and in

the four grade errors he attacks free will but without falling into the determinist camp the reason he doesn't fall into that camp is because the criticism in the four Great errors is targeted at our whole mental framework of cause and effect or rather the way in which cause and effect are applied in our thought nche can't be a determinist because he's not even convinced that our will is bound within an infinite net of causes uh that would be the normal determinist critique of the libertarian Free Will Doctrine but it would still fundamentally be the same

error and while n doesn't quite come up to the point of denying causality altogether he calls into question all of the commonplace habits in our thinking about causality that color the way that we make sense of reality that what we designate as a cause and what we designate as effect is often an arbitrary distinction usually the reason for distinguishing the cause from the effect Accords with some kind of psychological need need or inclination rather than a what might be a sober understanding of reality furthermore we often reason backward to determine the so-called cause of a

given event the mind will invent causes where one is not immediately perceptible Free Will is merely one of the erroneous thought processes that n draws our attention to In this passage but in fact this type of error goes all the way down to our conception of being of a reality full of quote unquote things that are consistent unitary coherent in other words existence or beings again one of those apparently self-evident truths contained within that word being uh that nevertheless has metaphysical implications about reality itself and that we nevertheless all use on a daily basis because

it's baked into the structure of our language so first I'll list off these four errors and then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of the passage in which n explains what he means by each and gives examples the errors are as follows one the error of confusing cause and effect this is quite straightforward We Believe something is a cause when actually it's an effect two the error of false causality that is We Believe something is in a causal relationship when in fact it only accompanies the so-called effect and that we've not actually established a

causal relationship three the error of imaginary causes we invent causes based on a sensation or a mental state and N says that this is in order to justify that mental state and finally four the error of free will a specific example of such an error in our causal thinking uh and on closer inspection the error of Free Will points to a more profound error that we establish such cause and and effect relationships such as the ego causing one's actions because of a psychological necessity the perceived consequences of believing in this causal relationship the consequences of

holding the belief or the consequences of not holding the belief that's what actually motivates the belief itself or are perceived or imagined consequences of uh if we hold the belief what happens if we don't hold the belief what happens what are the consequences for Humanity so confusing cause and effect false causality imaginary causes and then freedom of the will with that introduction let's look to the passage the beginning of the four Great errors concerns the error of confusing cause and effect and N explains this error through through the example of Alvis cornaro so cornaro is

a writer and an architect during the Italian Renaissance period he's born in the 15th century in padwa although the exact date of his birth is disputed and I bring this up because it's disputed for an interesting reason which we'll discuss in a moment but cornaro is born sometime between the 1460s in the 1480s and he lived until 1566 although he's related to a noble family from Venice cornaro is merely the son of an inkeeper uh you know he would sort of draw upon that relation to nobility uh because of The Prestige of it but you

know in fact he's from a lesser branch of the family but he's able to take what little money his family had and became a rather successful entrepreneur uh he's a somewhat interesting character actually he had little scientific training uh he attended University in Venice but he dropped out because he felt that the education he received was overly philosophical uh it was uh disconnected from practical knowledge uh which tells us something about him right there uh he made his fortune by obtaining permission to uh attempt to reclaim Land from the lagoon near Venice on the Adriatic

Sea so what cornaro does is he successfully applied the science of hydraulics to turn this portion of the the Lagoon uh into wheat fields and fishing ponds this is good for cornaro as a business venture and it's good for the city because the Lagoon it causes swarms of insects in the summertime and winter fogs uh it smells terrible there's just all sorts of problems it's much better to have wheat fields and fishing ponds next to your city than you know a stinky uh hazardous Lagoon so um after this uh cornaro publishes A Treatise on water

management and he would go on to become a patron of the Arts with the wealth that he made from uh Ventures like this and he is credited with introducing the Roman Renaissance style of architecture into Northern Italy none of this is why cornaro is of interest to nche by the way n's fascination with the example of cornaro is due to a series of treatises that he published later in his life cornaro is known as as a humanist to this very day because he attacked a Prejudice that was common in medieval European society and had lingered

it was popular up to his own time and this is the view that old age is nothing but a period of pain and Decay you know this is the harsh winter of Life the years that you spend as an elderly person are not but suffering and that this is in some way simply the natural order of human life that you should expect the and uh endure it stoically but just know that when you get to old age it's going to be a bad time you know you can Rejoice because your body is about to be

rejuvenated in heaven but it's more or less accepted that one's physical existence at the end of their natural life is well bad cornaro lives to a very old age and he says on the contrary one's elderly years are the most beautiful period of life he says that God Wills of us to live long and healthy lives and to live to reach this best age of one's lifetime uh because in old age all of your accumulated wisdom allows you to see the world with new eyes or with a just a better higher perspective than the youth

have on life and so cornaro becomes a kind of Health and Longevity Advocate and he lives to either his 90s or to be over a hundred years old his exact age when he dies is disputed because we have various birth dates for him with some sources saying he was born in 1464 uh although it seems more likely he was born in the 1480s uh I I that's just my belief that as cornaro becomes a sort of Guru on longevity people begin to overestimate his age it becomes exaggerated just how old this man lived to be

that's not an unusual phenomenon at all it's very common among for example uh DS sages or Zen Masters in the east in any case he did live to very old age for somebody living in the 15th century and so we finally come to the main point on which n will use cornaro in order to demonstrate a great error in thinking cornaro began to suffer from gastrointestinal problems and feverishness when he was around 35 years old his doctors advised him to eat a very sparce diet and cornaro restricted himself to 12 oun of food a day

bread egg yolk meat and soup and 14 ounces of wine uh every day so when he was in his 80s he was asked to write A Treatise on his secret to longevity and cornaro attributed his good health to this diet and cornaro genuinely believed that liberality in one's diet you know gluttonous consumption of food and drink he he says this is contrary to the will of God and this is evidenced by the fact that it shortens your life by living virtuously by consuming only the caloric intake that you absolutely need one earns a long life

and it's worth noting aside from this religious or moral dimension of Corn's thought this popular wisdom of caloric reduction would remain in the Zeitgeist for hundreds of years afterwards this was true up through n's time the popular wisdom that n calls karism is not really overturned until the 20th century and so now the passage n writes quote everyone knows the book of the famous cornaro in which he recommends his slender diet as a recipe for a long and happy life a virtuous one too few books have been read so much even now thousands of copies

are sold in England every year I do not doubt that scarcely any book except the Bible as is meat has done as much harm has shortened as many lives as this well-intentioned curiosum the reason the mistaking of the effect for the cause the worthy Italian thought his diet was the cause of his long life whereas the precondition for a long life the extraordinary slowness of his metabolism the consumption of so little was the cause of his slender diet he was not free to eat little or much his frugality was not a matter of quote unquote

free will he became sick when he ate more but whoever is no carp not only does well to eat properly but needs to a scholar in our own time with his rapid consumption of nervous energy would simply destroy himself with coro's diet C experto end quote that last line means believe him who has tried credit the expert so implicitly n is tying himself to the type of the nervous modern scholarly type at least he was at one time during his Professor days so again who says that nche can't take a shot at himself every once

in a while in any case as we've discussed many times on the podcast n spent quite a lot of time experimenting with his own diet he believed there was a very real link between your overall physical and mental health and um that one's daily habits your daily intake of food you shouldn't simply go about these things thoughtlessly the question of n's own diet and his views on diet are somewhat fascinating but the key point to understand about this is that Niche has come to understand something that I think most nutritionists today would agree with there

is no Universal diet now this doesn't mean there's no definite claim that we can make about what is healthy and unhealthy in general but different people have different physiological needs different Lifestyles uh just different restrictions on what they can or should eat for their best health and Nicha learns that through firsthand experience he also sees how the eating habits of European countries differ dramatically uh such as when he compares the eating habits of Germans to that of the Italians and so on as a result he's able to see that coro's diet can't be a Panacea

that in fact it was right for cornaro but that it would not be right for many others and if this is the case this means that coro's diet may have shortened a few lives rather than lengthened them that people with a higher caloric need might have fallen victim to thinking that you know Corn's diet is the cause of his lungevity as I noted earlier this isn't a critique of cause and effect as such and fact n says that coro's longevity is the cause of his diet if you pay attention that's actually a very funny claim

but he makes it quite clear a slow metabolism is the cause of a long life this kind of thinking in N by the way goes all the way back to his lectures on the pre- plutonics where he references the thought experiment by the philosopher of science Von be in which it is imagined that pulse rate correlates with one's EXP experience of the passage of time that is one hypothesis that as far as I understand has not been born out in terms of modern scientific knowledge as n's uh insights on nutrition perhaps have but that said

this colors n's thinking there's a speed to one's physiological existence that we can measure the existence of a phenomena in some sense uh by the tempo at which it manifests but if coro's metabolism is what causes his lung life his slow rate of metabolizing sort of equates to a long uh a slow and longlived existence then that means that his physiology what he is is what accounts for his dietary needs and in spite of all the unanswered questions that still remain concerning diet even to this day it seems quite clear that on an epistemological level

the causal relationship has not been established here the if we are to admit that one's diet depends on their physiology then is their physiology not the cause of their optimal diet rather than the optimal diet the cause of the state of their physiology we could of course say that living at variance with your optimal diet could be the cause of an early death or living in accord with your optimal diet is the cause of a long life but in that case couldn't we just take the argument a step further why can't this person eat only

according to their ideal diet right maybe somebody really needs to have just uh red meat and potatoes and vegetables and you know why is it that they're always eating junk food well maybe they have no impulse control okay so why do they not have good impulse control isn't there a physiological reason for that too something about just their nature that makes them uh crave junk food and so on and so on right it's very hard um to draw draw line at a certain point and say this is the final cause that's one of the things

that's sort of implicit behind this critique of our causal thinking is that in some sense it's always arbitrary where we say no this is the cause somebody can always come along and say okay but what's the cause of that and this answer doesn't satisfy us with our Common Sense wisdom right why is it not satisfying it's because we've been taught a certain mental framework throughout our whole lives that tells us exactly the opposite and N says that the radical idea here his pointing to this very error is the first example of his revaluation of all

values he writes that quote the most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded quote do this and that refrain from this and that then you will be happy otherwise end quote that's what n calls the original sin of reason In this passage in Twilight of Idols but I should note here that this tendency in thought was observed by n as early as human all to human it's what he characterized there as one of the most common false conclusions arrived at by human reason for the sake of comparison with the four Great errors

let's look at section 227 of human Al to human where n writes quote Christianity which was very innocent in its intellectual ideas demanded faith and nothing but faith and passionately rejected the desire for reasons it pointed to the successful result of faith you'll soon discover the advantage of faith is suggested you'll be blessed because of it the state in fact does the same thing and each father raises his son in the same way just take this to be true he says you'll discover how good it feels but this means that the truth of an opinion

should be proved by its personal benefit the usefulness of a teaching should guarantee its intellectual certainty and substantiation this is as if the defendant were to say in court my Defender is telling the whole truth for just see what happens as a result of his plea I am acquitted and quote so n's Point here and human Al to human is that the proof for a given proposition in this formula is the happiness that the proposition creates do this and you will be happy believe this you will discover how good it feels the church called this

the proof by Pleasure n's point in human Al to human is much more straightforward than it is in the four Great errors passage and Twilight of idols and human Al to human n is simply exposing the fact that this is a paralogism a false syllogism that does not serve as proof of anything n's Point here is simply this reasoning is false it's incredibly common but nonetheless it's false another example of human fallibility and reasoning often covered over by moralizing driven by a psychological need so it's typical of the critiques we find in this book our

reasoning here is human all to human in the four Great errors passage uh this proof by happiness is examined on another basis the fact that the proof by happiness is a confusion of the effect for the cause why is this because like with coro's diet in which slow metabolism you know a a physiology with natural longevity is actually the cause of one's sparce intake of calories n argues here that one's happiness is the cause of their virtue not virtue the cause of their happiness that some people are by their very Nature by their very Constitution

happy the reason why a person lives happily is the same reason that they live virtuously because of what they are which means that once again when we promise that virtuous living creates happiness we're reasoning based on a causal chain that we haven't actually established nche writes in Twilight of Idols quote a well-turned out human being a happy one must perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively from other actions he carries the order which he represents physiologically into his relation with other human beings and things in a formula his virtue is the effect of his happiness a

long life many descendants this is not the wages of virtue rather virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads among other things also to a long life many descendants and short to karism the church and morality say a generation a people are destroyed by license and luxury y my recovered reason says when a people approaches destruction when it degenerates physiologically then license and luxury follow from this namely the craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation as every exhausted nature knows it this young man turns pale early and welts his friends say

well that is due to this or that disease I say that he became diseased diseased that he did not resist the disease was already the effect of an impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion the newspaper reader says the party destroys Itself by making such a mistake my higher politics says a party which makes such mistakes has reached its end it has lost the shess of instinct every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration of instinct of the disintegration of the will one could almost Define what is bad in this way all that is

good is Instinct and hence easy necessary free laboriousness is an objection the God is typically different from the hero in my language light feet are the first attribute of divinity end quote when I read passages like that one in Twilight of Idols it's almost daunting to try and unpack it as they say because n has already condensed everything down to the finest subtlest version of the point but n asserts here virtue is an effect of Happiness which is a revaluation because it completely inverts The moralist Narrative that happiness only comes as an effect of virtue

this is why n says at the beginning of the four grade era s that this erroneous thinking is hollowed by the names religion and morality because all religion all morality is based on this proposed causal relation where virtue is the cause and happiness the effect whether it is the Christian duty to turn away from your sins or the Buddhist abandonment of Desire or the Muslim submission to God whether it is the deontologist who speaks of moral obligations or the utilitarian who preaches the greatest good for the greatest many or Socrates telling us that UD demonia

arises from living virtuously really it is with Socrates that n finds the ER philosopher of this formula n writes in another section of Twilight of Idols the problem of Socrates quote I try to understand the idiosyncrasy from which the socratic equation reason equals virtue equals happiness could have Arisen the weirdest equation I've ever seen and one which was essentially opposed to all the instincts of the older Helen end quote so once again nche would probably suggest that his notion that happiness is the cause and virtue the effect is closer to the older greis as he

called it the idea that the good man was good by nature and thus acted good by Nature had good feelings by Nature had a healthy diet by by Nature was virtuous by nature and so to return to the four Great erys passage this is why n says that a God has light feet because for the person with that natural goodness in them virtuous actions don't come as a labor they don't have to force themselves they don't have to tyrannize over themselves in order to comport themselves in a just or admirable way or to be generous

or courageous people if that is a burden it already indicates a disintegrating Instinct a failing Health n then gives a series of examples of the opposite that once health is not destroyed by Vice but one engages in Vice because of their failing Health that applies on a societal scale this is a point in N that often times I would say both his reactionary interpreters and his leftist critics fail to understand nche would completely disagree with anyone who thought that the answer to de Ence uh that is the decline of a civilization is to Institute some

program of virtue that we're going to get everyone back on the same page uh get everyone to begin acting virtuously again and uh through this reins the old values of the dying or dead Traditions uh and that this will then rejuvenate our society because not only is this remedy sure to fail on a deeper level the entire proposition is is based on that erroneous perception that Vice depraved Behavior sexual license luxury and so on that these are the cause of society's downfall n says no the society's downfall causes those things the reason physiology expanded to

a grand scale the declining physiology always needs greater and greater stimulation in order to feel anything at all the same way we might compared to you know the the taste buds of older people begin to wne the same way you simply don't get the same thrill out of something pleasurable the thousandth time that you do it as you did on the first or the second time furthermore errors and judgment errors in thinking mistakes these are again sourced to be the cause of one's downfall when really n's point is if you had been on top of

your game you wouldn't have made the mistake at all the mistake didn't cause you to fail uh it's like when in a game of chess you say you know I lost because I blundered one of my pieces but why did you blunder one of your pieces in the first place you know uh well you then you might say well because I was tired or I wasn't paying attention or I based my move on an instinct that turned out to be wrong sometimes players who are on the verge of defeat just start to blunder piece after

piece they get irritated and they make riskier moves to try and regain the advantage and they just lose piece after piece after piece and so too with the political chess game with the geopolitical chess game you know with a political party they're defeated not because they politically miscalculated they miscalculate because they're on the verge of defeat so I think those are all very helpful examples now we come to the second error the error of false causality in this error nche probes a bit further into our whole manner of thinking about cause and effect and he

asks where do we get our faith that we know what a cause is and this is a serious logical challenge I would think to put to most people with such Common Sense Notions in their head as to how they come to designate something as a cause and something else as the effect aside from however we might go about logically establishing this n says if you want to know the actual reason why people possess this faith and causality he thinks it comes from quote the realm of the famous inner facts of which not a single one

has so far been proved to be factual We Believe ourselves to be causal in the act of willing we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act nor did one doubt that all the antecedence of an act its causes were to be sought in Consciousness would be found there once sought as motives else one would not have been free and responsible for it finally who would have denied that a thought is caused that the ego causes the thought end quote so this faith in causality it comes from our own inner experience of

willing we perceive that our thoughts our motives have a cause which is the ego and that these motives then cause our actions but as n says this is a faith and that is because it's derived from an intuition it's derived from a Feeling Just a sense that we have that we're the cause of ourselves and the cause of our actions but it's not established by evidence or reasoned argument it was simply taken as a given that such inner facts are to be taken as true because what could be more of an immediate certainty than our

own perceptions and our own inner feelings but n thinks there's a mistake here he says that the so-called motive is an error because it is quote merely a surface phenomenon of Consciousness something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedence of the Deeds than to represent them end quote and N says of the alleged origin of our motives the ego that it has become quote a fable a fiction a play on words it has altogether ceased to think feel or will end quote what need it means here is that the ego

is a narrator which gives post Hawk explanations for the actions of the organism which in truth are quote unquote willed by impulses which are unconscious this notion of the self first seriously proposed by nche would later be expanded into the psychoanalytic school of thought led by Freud carried on by Yung and many others so the thinking feeling and willing does not originate in the ego in this new understanding the ego is this self-image this constantly self-creating narrator that is attempting to make sense of and justify the actions that are thought felt and willed by unconscious

drives so the ego is not the cause of motives and motives as the consciously articulated explanation for how we act n writes quote merely accompanies events it can also be absent end quote so what is our justification for saying the motive is the cause in other words the motive accompanies the event yes the motive that we consciously narrate to ourselves accompanies whatever act or deed we are doing but he says it can also be a absent from it that's a strange thought taking an action but with no conscious motive but nevertheless I'm sure almost all

of us have had something like this experience uh I mean when you do something and then later you come to the realization I don't know why I did that right shouldn't it be impossible to have that thought and yet many people have that thought perhaps if we know ourselves fairly well you know you might be able to come up with an explanation after the fact but that wouldn't change having the experience of doing something without being conscious of our motives and if that's the case then could conscious motive really be the cause of action or

is it merely an accompanying phenomenon not the cause so in other words an event happens several phenomena occur we have a human action and accompanying that phenomenon we have the conscious subject who is taking the action we have the conscious subject's understanding of their motive for the action what is the cause of the action taking place Nisha says that by attributing it to the motive or to the ego Consciousness we've just leapt to an unjustifiable conclusion in light of n's new appraisal of the self that would become powerfully influential on the psychoanalysts N writes quote

there are no mental causes at all the whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil end quote but then n goes on to suggest that this belief in mental causes is at the root of our notion of being what do I mean by that well when we Des designate a quote unquote cause we always have to essentialize events as things the reason for this is that the entire mental framework of cause and effect has to separate the effect from the cause or else it would be nonsensical so it has to

create a doer and then the deed a subject and then the action the subject takes but as n argues in genealogy of morality when he says that this is like separating the lightning from The Flash that's simply a grammatical uh f when we say the lightning causes the flash we're not we're saying nothing at all there we're simply taking an event that happened a series of Sensations that we had uh maybe it's sensations of a routinely repeated and even scientifically understood phenomenon like lightning but nevertheless we're taking an event that happened which is inseparable from

the process that creates that event it's all the same thing one big process one big happening one big becoming and we're distilling out of that a subject that does the thing uh further down in the passage nche continues quote all that happened was considered a doing all doing the effect of a will the world became to it a multiplicity of doers a doer a subject was slipped under all that happened it was out of himself that man projected his three inner facts that in which he believed most firmly the will the spirit the ego he

even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego he posited things as being as a cause Small Wonder that later he always found in things only that which he had put into them the thing itself to say it once more the concept of thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as a cause and even your atom my dear mechanists and physicists how much error how much rudimentary psychology is still residual in your atom end quote so when we slip being beneath everything that is the creation of the doer

that does the deed the lightning that does the flashing n's suggestion here is that this is a kind of Sly trickery it's like a magic trick sliding the card that the audience audience member revealed to you back under the deck right that's what we have done with all phenomena all that is given about a phenomena is sensation that's all we know of the world what is given to us by the senses and we are by no means justified in positing being on that basis these Sensations are caused by definite separate things with their own Essence

that is sort of uh the best I can do at positing the ordinary notion of being but we create the sense through our language through the creation of the thing the subject the the object this relates to atomism because the atomist is trying to discover in some sense uh the smallest thing the Bedrock of physical existence the smallest possible particle the smallest unit of matter because if we were to discover that we could then say that something something is real something is existent in the way a platonic form exists the atom is this thing the

atom is that enduring Unity that we always indicate when we indicate being and thus whatever you may think of atomism n's Point here is that the same tendency to think of the world in terms of being is the same psychological underg guarding of that adamist project fundamentally this is the same thing that undergirds the theists project he's articulating the same faith when he makes Spirit the cause of reality God is the cause of reality and here that prejudice is articulated in the same form as its origin reality as caused by the will of a thinking

subject that intuition of being a thing that thinks that's the reason for this type of error slipping that thingness that being underneath the ego itself and so we may say that in the Second Great error nich has gone farther in critiquing causal thinking itself the third error that of imaginary causes May at first appear to be less of an attack on causality than you know simply another misapplication of causality but as we get into this third error I think it will become clear there's a even further critique an even deeper critique here as well the

error of imaginary causes is best exemplified by dreams n here again returns to musings which he first put to the page in human all to human and which were later Revisited by Freud in his work the interpretation of Dreams it's a well-known phenomenon that dreams will experience external stimuli of some kind such as a loud sound light flickering on their eyes or as is the case in some of Freud's experiments being tickled with a feather while you sleep and the dreamer will incorporate that sensation into the logic of the dream n writes quote a cause

is slipped under a particular sensation for example one following a far off Cannon shot often a whole little novel in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist the sensation endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance it waits as it were until the causal Instinct permits it to step into the foreground now no longer as a chance occurrence but as meaning the cannon shot appears in a causal mode in an apparent reversal of time what is really later the motivation is experienced first often with a 100 details which pass like lightning and the shot follows

what has happened the representations which were produced by a certain State have been misunderstood as its causes end quote so the interesting thing about the dreaming mind is the way in which a sensation is represented to the dreaming subject as a cause of events which are entirely scripted and represented by the Mind alone for the Mind alone that the events in the dream are not in fact caused by the cannon shot the cannon shot is simply incorporated as the cause as an event with meaning the representations that were produced according to the logic of the

dream come from the motivating drives the entire cacophony of all the organs and impulses within the dreamer and dreams also have that funny way of playing with time as we all know from the film Inception for example in which some sense impression the dreamer receives can persist resonate as n says here and then be explained after the fact by the dreaming mind which n is comparing to the way that we represent the world our sense organs interact with our mind in such a way as to produce a representation the representation of course comes after the

initial stimulus but uh n says in the logic of the dream this is precisely reversed and where n makes another radical claim another challenge to the common sense wisdom is in the following paragraph quote in fact we do the same thing when awake most of our general feelings every kind of inhibition pressure tension and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs and particularly in the state of the nervous sympathic excite our causal Instinct we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that for feeling bad or feeling good we are never

satisfied merely to State the fact that we feel this way or that we admit this fact only become conscious of it only when we have furnished some kind of motivation memory which swings into action in such cases unknown to us brings up earlier states of the same kind together with the causal interpretations associated with them not their real causes end quote this I think is imminently relatable because for one I think it's fairly common uh it's it's a fairly common experience that sometimes just wake up and feel for lack of a more descriptive word happy

you're just having a good day and you can't even find any particular reason for it or maybe you wake up in a bad mood you know you woke up on the wrong side of the bed as we say and then a friend asks you why are you in such a bad mood and then what happens you begin to search for reasons some sort of consciously experienced or consciously articulated cause for why you're in a given mental state or in a given mood and the the memory begins to present you with all these possibilities here's why

you might feel that way and as n coins the phrase and Beyond Good and Evil there might not be such a fine distinction between finding and inventing finden and airen as these words are in German there's not as much of a difference between that as uh those two things as we would like to think now it's worth noting that in some sense one could make the argument that it's actually the point of memory to give you answers to the question why do I feel this way like specifically answering that question that's one of the main

tasks of memory because one of the main advantages of being a remembering organism is that when something isn't working for us we can course correct we can say I feel bad all the time what am I doing that's making me feel bad and that's an indisputably useful function of memory because an animal with no self consciousness across time doesn't have access to that kind of self-awareness it might know I feel bad in the moment but if you can't string moments together and bring to mind the fact I felt bad every single day for a week

now then course correction becomes difficult if not impossible and so this is the the main use of memory is actually to ask that question but this is where the niichan critique of our Notions of Truth given the context that we are biological uh creatures that were physiological creatures this is where that comes into play because then there's sort of a difficult question that is raised in the wake of this does memory actually establish a firm empirical foundation for positing causal relationships between external events and how we feel all memory can do is correlate together all

the times I felt a certain way and then ask what events preceded that but can we actually say with certainty that the events that proceeded the way we feel caused that feeling and if we can't say that with certainty which I think would follow from n's argument so far then tracing over all our past memories will actually not bring us closer to any sort of certainty it will simply remind us of past interpretations we've made past conscious explanations that we've given to ourselves post Hawk as to why that we feel the way that we do

and if every one of those past interpretations was just as erroneous as the one prior to it this kind of mental habit actually gets us nowhere the truth for n is that there's this whole Inplay of forces in our physiology that blind contest of impulses and drives this is in truth why we feel the way we do but because none of those causal factors are actually conscious to us none of them are freely chosen to say this uh to bring this to our attention as n does is the equivalent of saying well you simply feel

this way and that is that but that's not satisfying right that expl explanation or frankly that non-explanation is not satisfying and why well n says there's a psychological explanation for why it's not satisfying and it's very simple to locate a cause is to make known the unknown and this quote relieves Comforts and satisfies besides giving a feeling of power end quote when we're confronted by an event beyond our control or understanding the least we can do in order to not feel overwhelmed by this is to explain why it is the event is happening to give

the event a meaning simply put to remain in a situation in which we are surrounded by the unknown is terrifying and the mind starts to grab For A Cause in order to abolish the sense of Terror like sort of grasping at Vines to claw our way out of that pit right and so n writes quote First principle any explanation is better than none since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them the first representation that explains

the unknown as familiar feels so good that one quote considers it true the proof of pleasure of strength as a Criterion of Truth end quote we return to that old bad habit in drawing conclusions that Nisha wrote about way back in human Al to human the proof by by Pleasure believe this because it feels good in this case because it abolishes that which feels bad the sense of the unknown it doesn't even have to be a good explanation any explanation that delivers us from the fear of the unknown the first one that seems to work

as a cause we will pick that explanation as soon as possible so that we can stop thinking about it Nisha goes on to say of course that we will adopt familiar causes over over anything strange over anything never experienced before whatever we have already inscribed into memory and labeled as a cause will be our goto and memory will habituate this kind of thinking as a heuristic for future encounters with the unknown the lingering doubt the mysterious The Unexplained this is in many ways a torment causal thinking is a delivery from that torment but that doesn't

make it true it just makes it pleasurable see this is the the radical critique that NCH is giving us about the structure of our thought why we think the things that we do um as delus would put it truth is not an element of thought n here is saying pleasure is the use of familiar habitual thought patterns is pleasurable which is why once this error and thought seeps into our thinking we just continue in it insensibly there's a dimension of this in our own individual psychology as well n writes quote one kind of positing of

causes predominates more and more is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant that is as simply precluding other causes and explanations the banker immediately thinks of business the Christian of sin and the girl of her love end quote this kind of habituated thought pattern is a common error all its own albeit only a subset of this great error but we've all seen it I'm sure the political activist For Whom the cause of everything in life is political whatever the problem is that was because of the politics of the other side whatever the solution

is or whatever good thing we have going on in society that's because of the politics of my side every single problem is considered politically everything is assumed to be the result of this one system of causes which is dominant in their thought and so they ignore all the other causes um or we might think the paranoiac a person who's dominated by paranoid suspicions and fears they have an internal problem they have their own pathology their own excessive glood of fearful and suspicious feelings but they find the causes of those feelings um projected onto the external

world I'm fearful and suspicious not because I'm paranoid but because I'm being followed right anything that happens in such a person's life can be explained by some malevolent external Force um some person that they're suspicious of and on and on Carl yung's notion that everything within the psyche that remains unconscious becomes projected onto the world and and seen as a sort of external force or external actor that idea bear is mentioning here because it resembles n's idea In this passage everything beneath the surface of Consciousness is worked into the same familiar framework and projected onto

an external cause nche goes on to argue that quote the whole realm of morality and religion belongs under this concept of imaginary causes end quote and what N means by this is quite clear when we look at the concept of sin how would n regard sin given the critiques he's made so far about our causal thinking our misapplications of causality well he says the feeling of sin is quote slipped under a physiological discomfort one always finds reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself end quote this kind of critique hearkens back to the genealogy of morals in

which n says that the priest tells his flock you sickly sheep you are to blame for your own suffering n wonders in that work how it is that such a sick ideology such as the aesthetic ideal could ever take hold and this third great error is one of the elements of that the Dismal Workshop of the psyche that Christianity establishes in which guilt is actually heightened the individual is made to work at making himself feel guiltier and guiltier this Workshop gets going with the fuel of rantal directed by the priest but its operations follow the

formula as laid out here in the era of imaginary causes that is its structure that is to say that the individual suffers and without an explanation feels his suffering to be meaningless it's part of the unknown right the discomfort of the unknown is a thousand times more painful than the suffering itself the sense that one's enduring a kind of meaningless suffering the priest gives the parishioner suffering meaning that is his great benefaction to Mankind in a way that he can make their suffering meaningful and thus eases the pain of suffering by attributing it to a

cause now the entire mechanism of this and n view is very bad because it multiplies the suffering in order to deal with the suffering but that's neither here nor there for our purposes in analyzing this passage the key point is that by giving the suffering meaning the priest is engaging in this thinking based on imaginary causes and that it's better to have this imaginary cause than no cause at all n finds that this Prejudice is right there in the work of for example schopenhauer his once great influence whom he later rejected NE quotes world as

will in representation quote every great pain whether physical or spiritual declares what we deserve for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it and quote nche criticized this aspect of schopenhauer's thinking once again in human all to human where he said that we tend to think that because a sensation exists there must be some justification for it the word deserve in schopenhauer is really an attempt to legitimize or Justify suffering why well in order to give it that much needed meaning what does it mean for suffering to be deserved well it

means there was some way that it could have been prevented some way of acting or being that we did not properly fulfill and as a result we must suffer and N argues that reveals the truth of morality as a poisoner and slanderer of life that it is morality always has this idea behind it of treating the suffering of Life as a punishment for wrong action meanwhile good feelings good conscience happiness that's all conceived as the uh the reward for the Consciousness having done good deeds of having acted the proper way uh you know you used

your will to obey the laws of God and so on and so good feelings are the reward for right action bad feelings are the punishment for wrong action you know again the pleasure in these ideas is in giving a meaning to the entire human Psycho Drama of feelings and Sensations nche raises an issue with this as well though he writes that the so-called good conscience is quote a physiological state which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell them apart end quote in other words the reason you're in a

good mood is probably because you had a good wholesome meal and no indigestion while metabolizing it you say the cause of your happiness is your virtuous Deeds nche says the cause of your happiness is your gut he also takes issue with what he calls a naive fallacy that happiness comes from the successful completion of some Enterprise that in other words you know we reach a goal that we've we've long tried to attain you complete some meaningful task or project and that's what makes you happy nche says quote the successful termination of some Enterprise does not

by any means give a hypochondriac or a pascal agreeable feelings end quote so to use the example of Blaise Pascal it seems quite probable to me that Pascal was never happy or rarely if ever happy might be a more measured way for me to put it Pascal was an extreme depressive uh you know he writes extensively about just how horrible it would be if it turned out that the only existence were this world uh you know this world of impermanence and suffering right that the The Human Condition is like being one of many chained prison

prisoners simply awaiting our execution that we're like a mo of dust in a chaotic Universe whose scale is just beyond any comprehension these kinds of terrifying existential thoughts are always sort of storming through Pascal's mind and they don't go away when he completes some task or personal challenge they don't go away when he uh you know achieves his salvation of his soul through Christianity so he believes right um if anything these feelings are heightened now when Pascal becomes a Christian because he begins to fear for his own salvation and he writes that salvation is uncertain

uh even for the martyrs up until the time when you face you know the the justice of God or so on and so forth whether or not you find out that God will extend his grace to you uh we might say the example of the hypochondriac is also instructive here uh you know types with sustained high anxiety the actual circumstances of their lives don't matter that much uh in terms of regulating this state you know their brains just always invent some reason why they need to be freaking out because there's always at least some possibility

that you ought to be freaking out uh you know there's always uh could be some medical reason lurking within your physiology that you haven't become aware of yet you can always come up with something if your brain is dead set on worrying so again attributing the cause of your worrying to some definite event or external Force is an imaginary cause and that becomes very obvious with such terminally anxious people that they simply have something wrong something that's malfunctioning with their brain that's making them anxious and that in fact the searching for the imaginary causes of

their anxiety is actually part of the anxiety it's actually part of that anxious brain cycle uh you know similarly too with um depression depressed people aren't sad all the time because every single day of their lives is a never- ending tragedy of just horrible calamitous things uh it's because they're incapable of being happy that doesn't mean that that situation Can't Change by the way I'm not saying you're doomed to depression forever that's not what I'm saying at all by the way uh I'm not saying there isn't a solution for their depression it just means that

blaming external circumstances for a repeated sustained feeling that's happening inside of your head that is rather obviously a mistake and it's actually part of that uh whole pathology it's to make those projections n writes quote in truth all these supposed explanations are resultant States and as it were translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect one is in a state of Hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and Rich one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest morality and religion belong altogether to

the psych ology of error in every single case cause and effect are confused or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes end quote and so at this point we arrive at the final great error Free Will in many ways Free Will exemplifies all of these errors and thought that we've previously considered but n lists it as a special case and I think because from free will we can infer what it is that sets this entire erroneous thought process into motion The

Germ of the idea of Free Will n alleges comes from what he calls the foulest of all the theologians artifices so the worst thing that the religious thinkers have ever created this is the notion of responsibility which makes the subject dependent on the religious cast this is because responsibility is what sits at the foundations of all morality this is what we have been articulating throughout this examination when it comes to the Tendencies of all moralities and religions to promise happiness in exchange for quote unquote good behavior and to promise punishment is the wages of sin

responsibility is the concept required for all moralism without which the moral interpretation of human life just simply falls apart and why do we consider human beings responsible why are we responsible for our actions or for our will this is because of the belief in the doctrine of Free Will Free Will responsibility these concepts are more or less the same thing we might ask a simple question therefore why seek responsibility why would we create such a concept assuming that it is false as n says why would we have this notion then quote wherever responsibilities are sought

it is usually the Instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being such and such is traced back to will to purposes to acts of responsibility the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment that is because one wanted to impute guilt the entire old psychology the psychology of will was conditioned by the fact that its Originators the priests at the head of ancient communities wanted to create for themselves the right to punish or wanted to create this right

for God men were considered free so that they might be judged and punished so that they might become guilty consequently Every Act had to be considered as willed and the origin of Every Act had to be considered as lying within the Consciousness end quote so this passage is important in light of the fact that n has attempted to make sense of human life with what he calls an economy of principles that is to say the greatest possible explan explanatory power excuse me and the fewest possible principles if human life is to be understood naturalistically then

where do we get the notion of Free Will here as elsewhere n says the answer is Will To Power the Priestly class the aesthetic types they create free will they create moral responsibility because it's a means of wielding power it makes the individuals of the community resp responsible and not just responsible in in some sort of abstract sense responsible to the priest who is the intercessor between man and God if man thinks that there is right action and wrong action and that he's morally responsible for choosing right action over wrong he will naturally ask the

priest how should I act and if he's as uh acted wrongly in the past he'll go to the priest and ask to be absolved the priest attained power over the flock by making them guilty as n writes further down in the passage quote Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman end quote that is the aim of this doctrine of responsibility which is substantially identical with the doctrine of Free Will and N writes that the priests and theologians continue to infect becoming which is nature in its pure innocence with this guilt that this is in some

sense the ugliest thing that that the human animal does and that the human animal does uniquely it introduces guilt into innocent nature innocent becoming to nche therefore Free Will is not simply a doctrine that expresses a common sense truth about the world it was a weed that was planted in us all for a very specific purpose and perhaps all such ideas all such beliefs are planted for a similar such purpose to motivate a certain kind of behavior to express the power of a given Drive within mankind this doctrine of responsibility if we examine it in

light of a naturalistic understanding of the world is a strange and unique thing it doesn't really fit with the rest of our comprehension of nature where we never perceive we never look for responsibility we don't see responsibility in the cosmos and the orbiting bodies slamming into one another or flying off into the abysses of space the one place that we find it is in ourselves due to what we call these inner facts actually conscience or an intuition that has been inculcated in us and nurtured if we examine the doctrine strictly on a logical basis we

find it's premised on great leaps of logical supposition which designate the will as a causal Force the ego is the cause of the will and the ego ones self nature as an uncaused cause for which one becomes responsible for themselves that is as if one had created himself and decided his own nature this is a series of fallacious assumptions which we're not at all permitted to make according to the facts at hand it's nothing but an interpretation based on the attribution of imaginary causes taking something that merely accompanies the event as the cause of the

event and nature as he says is an immoralist who's trying with all his strength to quote take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again and to cleanse psychology history nature and social institutions end quote as this is his goal he must necessarily oppose himself to the doctrine of Free Will which is the origin of that stain on the self-consciousness of nature which is man the last section of this chapter the four grade errors Section 8 we can regard as n's mission statement so to speak if all of these

apparently self-evident beliefs are in fact errors then What doctrine ought we take up instead and he directly contrasts himself with the positions of Kant and schopenhauer who both questioned free will on a strictly logical basis but appealed to two things our intuition of Free Will I.E the way we think about ourselves and think about our actions regardless of the truth of those thoughts and also to the notion of intelligible Freedom that in spite of the fact that we act in one way or another in accord with our own nature meaning that apparently we simply are

one way or another man must have had a freedom to be this or that kind of person there must be some kind of choice prior to the realization of one's nature and N implies that this is because we've always held a more basic and blatantly false Prejudice but one which nevertheless colors are thinking that man is the effect of some special purpose or some special Destiny this kind of thinking is right in line with our entire concept of being which draws these lines of separation between subject and object between cause and effect between one phenomena

and another that man is divided from the rest of nature as a special quote unquote thing a special case something capable of of attaining the ideal of humanity the ideal of Happiness the ideal of morality but n argues quote the fatality of his Essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be and quote the counterd doctrine then to Free Will and to the entire doctrine of causality which includes uh even the reputation of free will the doctrine of determinism all of this is to be dismissed in the

face of n's new doctrine of Fate this is why I tend to call nich's view fatalism in which all apparently separate things and events are part of a vast tapestry and this isn't like a mechanistic series of billiard balls clacking into one after the other in a chain of causes and effects that must either end in the absurdity of an infinite regress or the equal absurdity of an uncaused cause uh and we might say by the way the infinite regress absurdity is found in in determinism and the uncaused cause absurdity is found in the libertarian

Free Will doctrine that is what the debate is between no n is not having any of this because to even create that image of existence as a chain a series of links is to draw arbitrary divisions uh to from our human perspective which informs us not one bit about the nature of human independent reality create all of these separate categories and then call them being or existence or causes and effects and in this way nche rebukes Kant while retaining his influence from the neocon which is with n all the way from the beginning of his

career he carries forward that intuition that causality is not something quote unquote out there in an objective world it's something which happens at the intersection of human uh perception and the so-called external world something that is useful for us as an interpretive framework even though it may be a false framework for all that we'll now look at the final paragraph of the chapter the conclusion of the four Great errors quote one is necessary one is a piece of faithfulness One belongs to the whole one is in the whole there is nothing which could judge measure

compare or sentence our being for that would mean judging measuring comparing or sentencing the whole but there is nothing besides the whole that nobody is held responsible any longer that the mode of being may not be traced back to a CAA Prima that the world does not form a Unity either as a sensorium or as a spirit that alone is the great Liberation with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored the concept of God was until now the greatest objection to existence we deny God we deny the responsibility in God only thereby do we

redeem the world world end quote to want one aspect of Fate to be different is to want the whole thing to be different the entire interplay of forces would be altered by one force disappearing or changing its course or intensity and yet reality is not to be conceived as a Unity as a monism in the way that say many of the early pre platonics thought that reality could be conceived no n is with the pluralists and he's with heraclitus the one is the many the many is not reducible to a one but neither is any

part of the many to be conceived as a cause unto itself divided ontologically from the rest of the many the many remains a many not the subject divided from the world of objects nich's fatalism therefore dares us to accept a pluralistic reality and every event within it as absolutely necessitated by a non-purposive relation of forces if we take that Great Leap of acceptance of regarding every piece of Fate as necessary we affirm the entirety of the great play of becoming and if one does this then imputing guilt or responsibilties to some portion of it would

be just another absurdity because every other part which we affirm and call good can only exist in relation to those parts that we call bad that we are to say along with Spinosa that the many modifications of existence the various phenomena meaning animals trees mountains lightning flash floods human beings Warfare disease weather patterns all of it can only be regarded as good or bad from the standpoint of our limited human reason from the standpoint of one particular perspective none of it is good or bad in and of itself because to say that would be to

deny the whole the right of existence in n's eyes this is the the effect of the god Doctrine the idea of an eternal moral judge presiding over all being being instantiated in our thought as an eternally existing form of Consciousness and an eternal moral law which intercedes in existence judges and condemns some affirms and uplifts others divides all the souls at the end of time into the good people and the bad people this is not a healthy view of existence it's an argument against existence in fact because it necessitates as it were a judgment passed

against the world if this world of Nature and the people living in it its states and Empires are to be judged from the absolute moral standard of Christianity then the world must be deemed guilty but we already know where this drive to call the world guilty comes from nche suggests that this is where we should look to determine why it is that we would make such errors as those that we have considered once again under our apparently cool-headed rationalist view of the world we find what is ultimately religious and that is true even of those

of us who have formally left religion these great errors still remain in our thought that's all for this week everyone thanks for joining me uh I'm back at home from after being on tour uh I was sick for a while I I don't know if you can hear it in my voice maybe it gives my voice a little more roughness or or grit but uh I'm getting better I'm improving as many of you know if you've been listening for a while you usually get sick when you're on tour like that but um we've got four

more episodes of this season coming out I'm excited for every one of these I think these are going to be really good um I'm happy with them regardless of what the uh reception is going to be but I think it's going to be uh pretty good all right that's all signing off if you enjoyed the N podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com untimely Reflections the link is in the description or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on

social media thank you for your support