The birth of morality and a new unease.

It seems to me that what has been called morality has thus far existed for the sake of incorporating what seems strange and fantastical, what seems ridiculous and improbable- for example, the freedom of the will or the idea of the self-caused, into an active and participatory consciousness. Thus, the conception of the freedom of the will has been rendered palpable in our feelings of guilt. These ridiculous conceptions, at least for our ancestors, posed a great riddle, for in their lack of knowledge they had no alternative explanation and had to accept them, they had to accept the reality of the gods, of the free will, of the absurd. In order to force themselves to accept such ideas they began to moralize. We now have many contrary explanations and no longer require the acceptance of ridiculous concepts, yet because we have no need to incorporate them into an active and participatory consciousness our truths have no chance of victory in the struggle with those errors which, over the centuries, have been wed with the stuff of life. We require some new order of poets to render us uneasy with regard to these truths, poets who have forgotten man as well as god, poets who are capable of championing under the banner of tragedy that young soul which must wrestle with the question of acceptance with regard to so many unfavorable truths for, insofar as joyousness is always the product of refined, deliberate craft, and the fruit of a peculiar ingenuity, it shall be precisely this neediness, the need for bearing the truth joyously as opposed to the need to accept the absurd for want of more reasonable truths, that will in the long run allow us to finally overcome our errors.