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Worldly Justice.—It is possible to unhinge worldly justice with the doctrine of the complete non-responsibility and innocence of every man. An attempt has been made in the same direction on the basis of the opposite doctrine of the full responsibility and guilt of every man. It was the founder of Christianity who wished to abolish worldly justice and banish judgment and punishment from the world. For he understood all guilt as “sin”—that is, an outrage against God and not against the world. On the other hand, he considered every man in a broad sense, and almost in every sense, a sinner. The guilty, however, are not to be the judges of their peers—so his rules of equity decided. Thus all dispensers of worldly justice were in his eyes as culpable as those they condemned, and their air of guiltlessness appeared to him hypocritical and pharisaical. Moreover, he looked to the motives and not to the results of actions, and thought that only one was keen-sighted enough to give a verdict on motives—himself or, as he expressed it, God.
Worldly Justice.—It is possible to unhinge worldly justice with the doctrine of the complete non-responsibility and innocence of every man. An attempt has been made in the same direction on the basis of the opposite doctrine of the full responsibility and guilt of every man. It was the founder of Christianity who wished to abolish worldly justice and banish judgment and punishment from the world. For he understood all guilt as “sin”—that is, an outrage against God and not against the world. On the other hand, he considered every man in a broad sense, and almost in every sense, a sinner. The guilty, however, are not to be the judges of their peers—so his rules of equity decided. Thus all dispensers of worldly justice were in his eyes as culpable as those they condemned, and their air of guiltlessness appeared to him hypocritical and pharisaical. Moreover, he looked to the motives and not to the results of actions, and thought that only one was keen-sighted enough to give a verdict on motives—himself or, as he expressed it, God.
Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Friedrich Nietzsche
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- Approximate author period: c. 1872 AD · industrial
author lifetime midpoint (1844–1900); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Human, All-Too-Human, Part 2 (1913 English edition) (1913 AD)
The Wanderer and His Shadow, complete printed aphorism 81; Paul V. Cohn translation; New York: The MacMillan Company,1913
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Author of Human, All-Too-Human, here represented by complete numbered passages in Helen Zimmern’s 1909 and Paul V. Cohn’s 1913 English editions. Catalogue lifetime 1844–1900; historical philosophical arguments and dated viewpoints require context, rather than treating every sentence as general advice.
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