Friedrich Nietzsche

with a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs.

The gay science

Soham Dasgupta

 to the voice of your conscience? And what gives you the right to consider such a judgment true and infallible? For this 

 — is there no conscience for that? Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your “conscience”? Your judgment “this is right” has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. “How did it originate there?” you must ask, and then also: “What is it that impels me to listen to it?” You can listen to its commands like a good soldier who hears his officer’s command. Or like a woman who loves the man who commands. Or like a flatterer and coward who is afraid of the commander. Or like a dunderhead who obeys because no objection occurs to him. In short, there are a hundred ways in which you can listen to your conscience. But that you take this or that judgment for the voice of conscience — in other words, that you feel something to be right — may be due to the fact that you have never thought much about yourself and simply have accepted blindly that what you had been 

 ever since your childhood was right; or it may be due to the fact that what you call your duty has up to this point brought you sustenance and honors — and you consider it “right” because it appears to you as your own “condition of existence” (and that you have a 

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