Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900 -- Criticism and interpretation; Philosophy
The knightly-aristocratic "values" are based on a careful cult of the
physical, on a flowering, rich, and even effervescing healthiness,
that goes considerably beyond what is necessary for maintaining life,
on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney--on everything,
in fact, which is contained in strong, free, and joyous action. The
priestly aristocratic mode of valuation is--we have seen--based on
other hypotheses: it is bad enough for this class when it is a question
of war! Yet the priests are, as is notorious, _the worst enemies_--why?
Because they are the weakest. 29
The slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an
external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology,
it requires objective stimuli to be of action at all--its action is
fundamentally a reaction. The contrary is the case when we come to the
aristocrat's system of values: it acts and grows spontaneously, it
merely seeks its antithesis in order to pronounce a more grateful and
exultant "yes" to its own self.... 35
The aristocratic man conceives the root idea "good" spontaneously and
straight away, that is to say, out of himself, and from that material
then creates for himself a concept of "bad"! This "bad" of aristocratic
origin and that "evil" out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred--the
former an imitation, an "extra," an additional nuance; the latter, on
the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in the
conception of a slave-morality--these two words "bad" and "evil," how
great a difference do they mark in spite of the fact that they have an
identical contrary in the idea "good." 39
It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic
races the beast of prey; the magnificent _blonde brute,_ avidly
rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from
time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the
wilderness--the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the
Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need.
It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea "Barbarian" on all
the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this
very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in
their highest civilisation. 40
What produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"?--for we _suffer_
from "man," there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather
that we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm "man"
is in the foreground and pullulates; it is that the "tame man," the
wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider
himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle,
a "higher man." ... 42-43
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