I should obey a man who knew the mountain; sick, I should obey a physician; and if I encountered a man who could enlighten me on the worth of our moral ideas, I should listen to him, I should follow him; but I do not find any one—no disciples, and masters still less … I am alone."[1] He says elsewhere, "Why do I not find among the living men who see higher than I and have to look down on me? Is it only that I have made a poor search? And I have so great a longing for such!"[2] Even his thought of a disciple is peculiar. He writes to Peter Gast (sending him a manuscript), "Read me with more distrust than you ordinarily do, say to me simply, this will go, that that will not go, this pleases me, why that does not, etc., etc."[3] Once he makes a disillusioned thinker say, "I listened for an echo [i.e., some real reproduction of his thought] and heard only praise;"[4] but even praise was rare for Nietzsche. So far as his later books were noticed at all, they were put down as "eccentric, pathological, psychiatric," and as a rule they were ignored. Even rare men like Burckhardt and Taine could not really follow them—they had not, he felt, the same inner need with him, the same will.[5] Those who had been friends from youth up became, for one reason and another, and not always without his fault, estranged. He writes his sister, "A deep man has need of friends, at least, unless he has a God: and I have neither God nor friends. Ah, my sister, those whom you call such, they were so in other times—but now?"[6] He notes down privately: "No longer does any one live who loves me; how should I still love life!" This was after the publication of Zarathustra, when he also says, "After such a call from the deepest soul, to hear no word of answer—that is a fearful experience, from which the toughest might go to pieces: it has taken me out of all ties with living men."[7] So (probably in the last year of his life), "It is now ten years—
- ↑ I cannot locate this passage in the Briefe, and must rely on D. Halévy, La vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, p. 314; cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, § 27.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 219, § 466; cf. XIV, 358–9, § 223.
- ↑ Again I must rely on Halévy, op. cit., p. 334.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 99.
- ↑ Briefe, I, 480, 495–6.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 305, § 133.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 1040.
