Hubris today characterizes our whole attitude towards nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines and the completely unscrupulous inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris characterizes our attitude to God, or rather to some alleged spider of purpose and ethics lurking behind the great spider’s web of causality – we could echo what Charles the Bold said in his battle with Ludwig XI: ‘je combats l’universelle araignée’ –; hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves, – for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the ‘salvation’ of the soul!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Third Essay’ in On the Genealogy of Morality (ed. K. Ansell-Pearson & trans. C. Diethe). Cambridge University Press: New York, 2010, p. 82.
