The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book III and IV
Nietzsche · en
Marriage, property, speech, tradition, race, family, people, and
State, are each links in a chain--separate parts which have a more
or less high or low origin. Economically they are justified by the
surplus derived from the advantages of uninterrupted work and multiple
production, as weighed against the disadvantages of greater expense
in barter and the difficulty of making things last. (The working
parts are multiplied, and yet remain largely idle. Hence the cost of
producing them is greater, and the cost of maintaining them by no means
inconsiderable.) The advantage consists in avoiding interruption and
incident loss. Nothing is more expensive than a start. "The higher the
standard of living, the greater will be the expense of maintenance,
nourishment, and propagation, as also the risk and the probability of
an utter fall on reaching the summit."
732.
In bourgeois marriages, naturally in the best sense of the word
marriage, there is no question whatsoever of love any more than there
is of money. For on love no institution can be founded. The whole
matter consists in society giving leave to two persons to satisfy
their sexual desires under conditions obviously designed to safeguard
social order. Of course there must be a certain attraction between the
parties and a vast amount of good nature, patience, compatibility, and
charity in any such contract. But the word love should not be misused
as regards such a union. For two lovers, in the real and strong meaning
of the word, the satisfaction of sexual desire is unessential; it is a
mere symbol. For the one side, as I have already said, it is a symbol
of unqualified submission: for the other, a sign of condescension--a
sign of the appropriation of property. Marriage, as understood by the
real old nobility, meant the breeding forth of the race (but are there
any nobles nowadays? _Quaeritur_),--that is to say, the maintenance
of a fixed definite type of ruler, for which object husband and wife
were sacrificed. Naturally the first consideration here had nothing to
do with love; on the contrary! It did not even presuppose that mutual
sympathy which is the _sine qua non_ of the bourgeois marriage. The
prime consideration was the interest of the race, and in the second
place came the interest of a particular class. But in the face of the
coldness and rigour and calculating lucidity of such a noble concept
of marriage as prevailed among every healthy aristocracy, like that
of ancient Athens, and even of Europe during the eighteenth century,
we warm-blooded animals, with our miserably oversensitive hearts, we
"moderns," cannot restrain a slight shudder. That is why love as a
passion, in the big meaning of this word, was invented for, and in, an
aristocratic community--where convention and abstinence are most severe.
733.
_Concerning the future of marriage._ A super-tax on inherited property,
a longer term of military service for bachelors of a certain minimum
age within the community.