the latter summarily that he wants them tended by the more spiritual and gifted members of their own class—defining thus the function of the ascetic priest.[1] He would make their lot as easy as possible. Ironical as it may sound—he does not mean it ironically—he would help them to pass away. When something has to fall, it may be a mercy to hasten its falling—such is his feeling.[2] He puts it as a proposition of human love, his first proposition: the weakly and misshapen should pass away, and we should help them to this end.[3] He also hints that they may come to choose their own passing away, dying then in perhaps greater dignity than they have ever lived, and almost winning the right to life again.[4]
Such, then, and so inspired are the limits which Nietzsche would set to pity.[5] Pity of the prevailing, thoughtless kind he calls a crime against life, an extreme immorality—he does not mince his words in speaking of it.[6] Indeed, he goes further, and in a lofty way would not pity his own disciples. "To the men that concern me, I wish suffering, solitude, illness, mistreatment, disgrace.… I have no pity for them, because I wish them the one thing that can prove today whether a man has value or not—that he hold his ground."[7] Yet the warnings which Nietzsche utters in general against pity are not, he says, for all, but rather for him and his kind, i.e., those who rise to his point of view; the implication being that otherwise to renounce pity might be mere callousness and brutality.[8] o And how far he is from condemning pity per se, is shown in what be says of "our pity," "my pity." It is a pity for the too common lot of the higher, rarer types of men, seeing how easily they go to pieces, what a waste there often is of their capacities.[9] It is a pity over the low averages of human life, over the process of making men smaller, that he thinks is going on under Christian and democratic influence,
- ↑ Genealogy etc., III, §§ 14, 15.
- ↑ Zarathustra, III, xii, § 20.
- ↑ The Antichristian, § 2.
- ↑ Cf. footnote 47, p. 301.
- ↑ Edmund Burke spoke of "minds tinctured with humanity"—is not this a happy phrase, "tinctured," not controlled?
- ↑ Will to Power, § 246; cf. § 54.
- ↑ Ibid., § 910.
- ↑ Zarathustra, IV, vii.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 269; Will to Power, § 367.
