The Little Review, September 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 6)Various
General
The Little Review, September 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 6)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
“many too many,” for the superfluous who in great choruses bawl of the
most superfluous that there is for man. Great souls seek sites for lone
ones and twain ones, they seek them beyond the many too many—there they
sing the songs of that which is necessary for man, the single and
irreplaceable melody, through which man jubilates along to his higher
existence. The state has killed and crushed the peoples, it has summoned
into the world the great lie: “I, the state, am the people.” But there
is only one redemption and convalescence from the state on the part of
the people, a flight “to people who do not understand the state and hate
it as an evil eye and sin in custom and law; which speaks its own tongue
of good and evil and makes its own language of custom and law.” Thus is
secession the emigration from the state into the _people_; the culture
of the future is the overcoming of the state through the people!
To be sure, it is with mixed feelings that we penetrate and interpret
the preaching of the anarchist Nietzsche. The catalogue of sins which,
on a deeper observation of life, we have to charge to state _cultus_ is
indeed great, and hence there is an anarchistic side to the heart of the
modern man, as soon as he thinks of his own rights, as soon as he
requires light and air for the free unfolding of his personality. We
know that the state does not possess eternal life. The state is only a
special form in which human social life can exist, not human society
itself. There have not always been states. They came to be in the long
course of the evolution of a people’s life! What comes to be must pay
its toll to Father Time. The state will change—and pass! Hence it is
indeed folly and superstition, it is idolatry, when we attribute eternal
worth to transitory phenomena, and accord them an unconditional dominion
over us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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