Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two — John Shaqi
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume TwoNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy, Ancient
else, yea I behold behind these movements, those truly international
homeless money-hermits, as the really alarmed, who, with their
natural lack of the State-instinct, have learnt to abuse politics as
a means of the Exchange, and State and Society as an apparatus for
their own enrichment. Against the deviation of the State-tendency
into a money-tendency, to be feared from this side, the only remedy
is war and once again war, in the emotions of which this at least
becomes obvious, that the State is not founded upon the fear of the
war-demon, as a protective institution for egoistic individuals, but
in love to fatherland and prince, it produces an ethical impulse,
indicative of a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as a
dangerous and characteristic sign of the present political situation
the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish
State-less money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive of the
enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern
financial affairs fallen into strange hands, and if I imagine all evils
of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to
have either germinated from that root or grown together with it, one
will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a Pæan on war. Horribly
clangs its silvery bow; and although it comes along like the night,
war is nevertheless Apollo, the true divinity for consecrating and
purifying the State. First of all, however, as is said in the beginning
of the "Iliad," he lets fly his arrow on the mules and dogs. Then he
strikes the men themselves, and everywhere pyres break into flames.
Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a necessity for the
State as the slave is for society, and who can avoid this verdict if
he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never-equalled Greek
art-perfection?
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