goal is different, for if it pleased mankind, mankind could adopt it and give itself a corresponding moral law of its own pleasure.[1] And despite all Nietzsche's concern for freedom, he is eager to recommend his own ideal—eager and, one might almost say, imperious. The higher meaning of the world's spiritual endeavor, the supreme significance of the striving of the highest minds is, he thinks, to find the thought that will stand over mankind as its star.[2] He enters the lists—here is the practical meaning of his will to power.
Yet, though Nietzsche recognizes this voluntaristic or æsthetic basis of the moral aim he proposes, we must not be led to think that there is any lack of stringency, whether logical or practical, in the aim when once accepted. All morality, Nietzsche's included, involves law and subordination. We choose the ideal, not the means by which to attain it—these are fixed by the general nature of things. The taste that is voluntary is only the supreme taste, not the lesser ones. If we want a strong physical organism, what we like or dislike at the moment, whether as to exercise or to diet, may count for little—so and so we have got to live.[3] It is the same with a great social ideal: if we will the end, we must will the means, whether they strike the fancy and please us or not. Even a musical melody, remarks Nietzsche, "has laws of logic which our anarchists would cry down as slavery."[4] Professor Riehl cites in this connection Goethe's word about "exact fancy," the fancy of the classic artist, of classic art; he says that moral judgments, even taken as æsthetic, remain absolute demands, whose object is formed by generally valid ideas of value.[5] Nietzsche thinks that connecting morals with art in general means no reproach, I may say in passing. It is true that art has as a rule looked backward, glorifying the past; but in its essential nature it is simply an ideal-building force, a making visible of our innermost hopes and wishes.[6] From this point
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 108.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 360, § 679.
- ↑ Nietzsche calls it the greatest error to think that taste determines the value of a food or an action (Werke, XII, 78, §150). Cf. the remark about "actual relevance to the preservation of life, strict causality" (Werke, XI, 204, § 121).
- ↑ Letter to Krug, Briefe, I, 321.
- ↑ Op. cit., pp. 130-1.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 355, § 178.
