"It may be that this knowledge fills us with terror," he wrote; 'I
such terror is the almost necessary effect of all the most profound
knowledge. For nature is still a frightful thing, even when intent on
creating the most beautiful forms. It is so arranged that culture, in
its triumphal march, benefits only a trivial minority of privileged
mortals, and it is necessary that the slave service of the great
masses be maintained, if one wish to attain to a full joy in becoming
_(werde lust)._
"We moderns have been accustomed to oppose two principles against the
Greeks, the one and the other invented to reassure a society of an
altogether servile kind which anxiously avoids the world, _slave:_ we
talk of the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour.'
"The language of the Greeks is other. They declare in simple terms that
work is a disgrace, for it is impossible that a man occupied with the
labour of gaining a livelihood should ever become an artist....
"So let us avow this cruel sounding truth: slavery is necessary to
culture; a truth which assuredly leaves no doubt as to the absolute
value of being.
"The misery of those men who live by labour must be made yet more
vigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world
of art.... At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the
privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and
given such conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of
needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by
slavery, this other affirmation is, most certainly, even truer: for
lack of slavery, we are perishing."
But what was the origin of this very institution of slavery? How was
the submission of the slave, that "blind mole of culture," secured?
The Greeks teach us, answered Nietzsche: "The conquered belongs to the
conqueror," they say, "with his wives and his children, his goods and
his blood. Power gives the first _right,_ and there is no right which
is not at bottom appropriation, usurpation, power." Thus Nietzsche's
thought was brought back towards its first object. The war had inspired
him in the first instance. Now he rediscovers that solution. In sorrow
and in tragedy, men had invented beauty; into sorrow and into tragedy
they must be plunged, and there retained that their sense of beauty
might be preserved. In pages which have the accent and rhythm of a
hymn, Friedrich Nietzsche glorifies and invokes war:
"Here you have the State, of shameful origin; for the greater part of
men, a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes
them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become
forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to
courage and uplifted to heroism. Yes, the State is to the blind masses,
perhaps, the highest and most worthy of aims; it is, perhaps, the State
which, in its formidable hours, stamps upon every face the singular
expression of greatness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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