The Passage For Nietzsche On Religion Rhetorical

Devices Essay, Research Paper

Following is an excerpt from Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche.

The most general formula at the basis of every religion and morality is: ‘Do this and this, refrain from this and this – and you will be happy! Otherwise….’ Every morality, every religion is this imperative – I call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason. In my mouth this formula is converted into its reverse – first example of my ‘revelation of all values’ : a well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks form other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of happiness…. Long life, a plentiful posterity is not the reward of virtue, virtue itself is rather just the slowing down of metabolism which also has, among other thing, a long life, a plentiful posterity, in short Cornarism, as its outcome. – The Church and morality say : ‘A race, a people perishes through vice and luxury’. My restored reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is aquatinted with) follow therefrom. A young man grows prematurely old and faded. His friends say: this and that illness is to blame. I say: that he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness, was already the consequence of an impoverished life, a hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished – it is no longer secure in its instincts. Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disgregation of will: one has thereby virtually defined the bad. Everything good is instinct – and consequentially easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, the god is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet a