Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume SixNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume Six
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Human beings
INDUSTRY IN THE SOUTH AND THE NORTH.--Industry arises in two entirely
different ways. The artisans of the South are not industrious because
of acquisitiveness but because of the constant needs of others. The
smith is industrious because some one is always coming who wants a
horse shod or a carriage mended. If nobody came he would loiter about
in the market-place. In a fruitful land he has little trouble in
supporting himself, for that purpose he requires only a very small
amount of work, certainly no industry; eventually he would beg and
be contented. The industry of English workmen, on the contrary, has
acquisitiveness behind it; it is conscious of itself and its aims; with
property it wants power, and with power the greatest possible liberty
and individual distinction.
479.
WEALTH AS THE ORIGIN OF A NOBILITY OF RACE.--Wealth necessarily
creates an aristocracy of race, for it permits the choice of the most
beautiful women and the engagement of the best teachers; it allows a
man cleanliness, time for physical exercises, and, above all, immunity
from dulling physical labour. So far it provides all the conditions
for making man, after a few generations, move and even act nobly and
handsomely: greater freedom of character and absence of niggardliness,
of wretchedly petty matters, and of abasement before bread-givers. It
is precisely these negative qualities which are the most profitable
birthday gift, that of happiness, for the young man; a person who is
quite poor usually comes to grief through nobility of disposition,
he does not get on, and acquires nothing, his race is not capable
of living. In this connection, however, it must be remembered that
wealth produces almost the same effects whether one have three hundred
or thirty thousand thalers a year; there is no further essential
progression of the favourable conditions afterwards. But to have less,
to beg in boyhood and to abase one's self is terrible, although it may
be the proper starting-point for such as seek their happiness in the
splendour of courts, in subordination to the mighty, and influential,
or for such as wish to be heads of the Church. (It teaches how to slink
crouching into the underground passages to favour.)
480.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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