The influence of the greatness or smallness of the aims.
The influence of the intellectuality of the means. The influence of the
behaviour in action. The influence of success or failure. The influence
of opposing forces and their value. The influence of that which is
permitted and that which is forbidden.
780.
The tricks by means of which actions, measures, and passions are
legitimised, which from an individual standpoint are no longer good
form or even in good taste.--
Art, which allows us to enter such strange worlds, makes them tasteful
to us.
Historians prove its justification and reason; travels, exoticism,
psychology, penal codes, the lunatic asylum, the criminal, sociology.
Impersonality (so that as media of a collective whole we allow
ourselves these passions and action--the Bar, juries, the bourgeois,
the soldier, the minister, the prince, society, "critics") makes us
feel that we are _sacrificing something._
781.
Preoccupations concerning one's self and one's eternal salvation are
not expressive either of a rich or of a self-confident nature, for the
latter lets all questions of eternal bliss go to the devil,--it is
not interested in such matters of happiness it is all power, deeds,
desires; it imposes itself upon things; it even violates things. The
Christian is a romantic hypochondriac who does not stand firmly on his
legs.
Whenever hedonistic views come to the front, one can always presuppose
the existence of pain and a certain ill-constitutedness.
782.
"The growing autonomy of the individual"--Parisian philosophers like
M. Fouillée talk of such things: they would do well to study the
_race moutonnière_ for a moment; for they belong to it. For Heaven's
sake open your eyes, ye sociologists who deal with the future! The
individual grew strong under quite opposite conditions: ye describe the
extremest weakening and impoverishment of man; ye actually want this
weakness and impoverishment, and ye apply the whole lying machinery of
the old ideal in order to achieve your end. Ye are so constituted that
ye actually regard your gregarious wants as an ideal! Here we are in
the presence of an absolute lack of psychological honesty.
783.
The two traits which characterise the modern European are apparently
antagonistic _individualism and the demand for equal rights_: this I
am at last beginning to understand. The individual is an extremely
vulnerable piece of vanity: this vanity, when it is conscious of its
high degree of susceptibility to pain, demands that every one should
be made equal; that the individual should only stand _inter pares_.
But in this way a social race is depicted in which, as a matter of
fact, gifts and powers are on the whole equally distributed. The pride
which would have loneliness and but few appreciators is quite beyond
comprehension: really "great" successes are only attained through the
masses--indeed, we scarcely understand yet that a mob success is in
reality only a small success; because _pulchrum est paucorum hominum._
No morality will countenance order of rank among men, and the jurists
know nothing of a communal conscience. The principle of individualism
rejects _really great_ men, and demands the most delicate vision for,
and the speediest discovery of, a talent among people who are almost
equal; and inasmuch as every one has some modicum of talent in such
late and civilised cultures (and can, therefore, expect to receive his
share of honour), there is a more general buttering-up of modest merits
to-day than there has ever been. This gives the age the appearance of
_unlimited justice._ Its want of justice is to be found not in its
unbounded hatred of tyrants and demagogues, even in the arts; but in
its detestation of noble natures who scorn the praise of the many. The
demand for equal rights (that is to say, the privilege of sitting in
judgment on everything and everybody) is anti-aristocratic.
This age knows just as little concerning the absorption of the
individual, of his mergence into a great type of men who do not want to
be personalities. It was this that formerly constituted the distinction
and the zeal of many lofty natures (the greatest poets among them); or
of the desire to be a _polis,_ as in Greece; or of Jesuitism, or of
the Prussian Staff Corps, and bureaucracy; or of apprenticeship and a
continuation of the tradition of great masters: to all of which things,
non-social conditions and the absence of _petty vanity_ are necessary.
784.
_Individualism_ is a modest and still unconscious form of will to
power; with it a single human unit seems to think it sufficient to free
himself from the preponderating power of society (or of the State or
Church). He does not set himself up in opposition as a _personality,_
but merely as a unit; he represents the rights of all other individuals
as against the whole. That is to say, he instinctively places himself
on a level with every other unit: what he combats he does not combat as
a person, but as a representative of units against a mass.
Socialism is merely an agitatory measure of individualism: it
recognises the fact that in order to attain to something, men must
organise themselves into a general movement--into a "power." But what
the Socialist requires is not society as the object of the individual,
_but society as a means of making many individuals possible_: this is
the instinct of Socialists, though they frequently deceive themselves
on this point (apart from this, however, in order to make their kind
prevail, they are compelled to deceive others to an enormous extent).
Altruistic moral preaching thus enters into the service of individual
egoism,--one of the most common frauds of the nineteenth century.
_Anarchy_ is also merely an agitatory measure of Socialism; with it
the Socialist inspires fear, with fear he begins to fascinate and to
terrorise: but what he does above all is to draw all courageous and
reckless people to his side, even in the most intellectual spheres.
In spite of all this, individualism is the most modest stage of the
will to power.
***
When one has reached a certain degree of independence, one always
longs for more: separation in proportion to the degree of force;
the individual is no longer content to regard himself as equal to
everybody, he actually _seeks for his peer_--he makes himself stand out
from others. Individualism is followed by a development in groups and
organs; correlative tendencies join up together and become powerfully
active: now there arise between these centres of power, friction,
war, a reconnoitring of the forces on either side, reciprocity,
understandings, and the regulation of mutual services. Finally, there
appears an order of rank.