Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/464

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NIETZSCHE THE THINKER

sharp outward form (as when the Aryan races came down on the European aborigines). At other times no actual trial may be necessary, the results being taken for granted in advance. But even after violence, relations of interdependence may result all the same, and the two parts of the social body fit together with a natural, almost chemical affinity.[1] Much of the misunderstanding of Nietzsche, owing to his use of the language of conquest to describe the relation of the ruler to the subject-classes, is due to a failure to perceive that conquest may issue eventually in an amicable relation in which advantages exist on both sides. t Sometimes, too, he describes the ruler as a felt benefactor from the start, one "to whom the weak and suffering and oppressed and even animals gladly turn and naturally belong."[2] He conceives of Napoleon, not as an oppressor of the mass, but rather as a relief, a benefit to them.[3] From a similar point of view he advances the idea that the European masses, who are now being mixed, averaged, democratized, will some day need a strong man, a "tyrant," as they need their daily bread.[4] In short, ruling benefits the ruled; social organization is not only served by the weak, it serves them. Hence to say, as Dr. Dolson does, that the weak in Nietzsche's eyes are "nothing but material upon which the strong may exercise their power," that he bids the great man restrain his sympathetic and social feelings so far as he can, even destroying them utterly, if possible, as unworthy of him,[5] is hardly an adequate account of the matter. In the end, then, there is no "social dualism," and it is a question whether there ever was; u there is of course a difference, even a certain antagonism, between the classes, but not to such an extent as to hinder co-operation in the social body—the difference might even be said to be to a certain extent a condition of co-operation. v

The difficulties are greater when we approach the matter from the side of the higher classes. Here what Nietzsche says really puzzles us. I have in mind now not the ruler class proper, though it is what Nietzsche says of these that has given

  1. Cf. the striking metaphor used in Werke, IX, 155.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil, § 293.
  3. Ibid., § 199.
  4. Ibid., § 242.
  5. Op. cit., pp. 98-9.