The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche · en
It is evident, of course, that the feeling of superiority has a
complement in the feeling of inferiority. Every man, in other words,
sees himself, in respect to some talent possessed in common by himself
and a rival, in one of three ways: he knows that he is superior, he
knows that he is inferior, or he is in doubt. In the first case, says
Nietzsche, the thing for him to do is to make his superiority still
greater by yielding to its stimulation: to make the gap between himself
and his rival wider and wider. In the second case, the thing for him to
do is to try to make the gap smaller: to lift himself up or to pull his
rival down until they are equal or the old disproportion is reversed.
In the third case, it is his duty to plunge into a contest and risk
his all upon the cast of the die. "I do not exhort you to peace,"
says Zarathustra, "but to victory!"[5] If victory comes not, let it
be defeat, death and annihilation--but, in any event, let there be a
fair fight. Without this constant strife--this constant testing--this
constant elimination of the unfit--there can be no progress. "As
the smaller surrenders himself to the greater, so the greater must
surrender himself to the will to power and stake life upon the issue.
It is the mission of the greatest to run risk and danger--to cast dice
with death."[6] Power, in a word, is never infinite: it is always
becoming.
Practically and in plain language, what does all this mean? Simply that
Nietzsche preaches a mighty crusade against all those ethical ideas
which teach a man to sacrifice himself for the theoretical good of his
inferiors. A culture which tends to equalize, he says, is necessarily
a culture which tends to rob the strong and so drag them down, for the
strong cannot give of their strength to the weak without decreasing
their store. There must be an unending effort to widen the gap; there
must be a constant search for advantage, an infinite alertness. The
strong man must rid himself of all idea that it is disgraceful to yield
to his acute and ever present yearning for still more strength. There
must be an abandonment of the old slave-morality and a transvaluation
of moral values. The will to power must be emancipated from the bonds
of that system of ethics which brands it with infamy, and so makes the
one all-powerful instinct of every sentient creature loathsome and
abominable.