discipline tend to vanish. On the other hand, the desire for personal enjoyment, for wealth and luxury, knows no bounds. Nietzsche once gives a formal characterization of modernity: absence of moral discipline—human beings being left to grow; lack of authority; lack of moderation within settled horizons; lack of fineness in judgment; a chaos of contradictory valuations.[1] They are marks of life in process of disorganization. Nietzsche admits that our institutions no longer fit us, but he says that the trouble is with us, not with them. We live for today, live very fast, very irresponsibly—this is our "freedom"; at the mere mention of "authority" we think we are in danger of a new slavery. But in order that there may be great social growths and institutions that fit them, there must be a species of will, instinct, imperative, which is "antiliberal bis zur Bosheit"; a will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility stretching over centuries, to a solidarity of the generations forward and backward in infinitum. Then comes a growth like the imperium Romanum.[2]
To illustrate what he means, he speaks of marriage. The institution is losing its reason today—why? Because the instincts and aims that have created it and lie back of it are disappearing. More and more there is a tendency to (Nietzsche says "indulgence in favor of") love-matches. But the institutions of society are never founded on an idiosyncrasy, and marriage cannot rest on an idiosyncrasy like "love." At its basis is a combination of impulses belonging to human nature, i.e., strong human nature, as such: the impulse of sex, the impulse of property (wife and child as property), the impulse of dominion, which continually organizes that smallest social structure, the family, and which needs children and heirs in order to hold fast even physiologically an attained measure of power, influence, wealth, and so to make possible tasks and instinct-solidarity reaching from century to century. The reason of marriage lay in the sole juristic responsibility of the man-thereby it got a center of gravity, while today it goes hitching along (auf beiden Beinen hinkt); it lay in its indissolubleness
