"But to speak exactly, society does not exist; what exists is societies, that is to say different groupings in which individuals find themselves united. To speak of society simply is to use the manner of speech of an attorney-general, not that of a man of science or of a philosopher" (Un romantisme utilitaire, I, 181).
k Cf. a striking picture of man's dread of isolation in early times and its moral significance: "To be alone, to feel detached, neither to obey nor to rule, to have the signification of an individual—this was then no pleasure, rather a punishment: one was condemned 'to be an individual.' To be free in thinking was discomfort itself. While we feel law and regulation as compulsion and loss, formerly egoism was the painful thing, a real misery. To be oneself, to value according to one's own weight and measure—for this there was no taste. Inclinations of such an order were felt as something insane, since every distress and every fear were associated with being alone. Then 'free will' had bad conscience for a very near neighbor; and the unfreer a man was in his conduct, the more flock-instinct and not personal judgment expressed itself in it, the more moral did he feel himself to be" (Joyful Science, § 117). Cf. the general remarks on man's need of social recognition by William James, Psychology, I, 293.
l Cf. the remark of William James, "The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world" (op. cit., I, 316).
CHAPTER XVIII
a Nietzsche in writing to Brandes (see Werke, pocket ed., IX, xxvii) says that many words have with him particular shades of meaning (Salzen), but in this case he does little more than conform to current German usage.
b Cf. the reference (Dawn of Day, § 9) to those who depart from tradition, prompted by motives like those which originally led to its establishment, viz., the group's good; also the line,
"Strange to the people, and yet useful to the people"
in "Scherz, List und Rache," § 49 (prefixed to Joyful Science); still again the description of the Schopenhauer type of man and reformer in "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4.
c Cf. William Blake's view of evil as one of the pair of wedded contraries without which there is no progression (Works, ed. by E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, II, 63); also the views of Jacob Böhme as given by Karl Joël (op. cit., pp. 194-5). Lou Andreas-Salomé happily states Nietzsche's position (op. cit., pp. 199-200). See further, Will to Power, §§ 1015, 1017, 1019. From a slightly different point of view Nietzsche says (Werke, XII, 86, § 168) , "We æstheticians of the highest order would not miss also crimes and vice and torments of the soul and errors—and a society of the wise would probably create for itself an evil (böse) world in addition. I mean that it is no argument against the æsthetic nature (Künstlerschaft) of God that evil and pain exist—however, against His 'goodness.' But what is goodness? The disposition to help and do good to, which just so far presupposes those for whom things go badly, and who are bad (schlecht)"!
d Cf. what he wrote a friend in 1881, "It grieves me to hear that you suffer, that anything is lacking to you, that you have lost some one—although in my case suffering and deprivation belong to the normal and not, as for you, to the unnecessary and irrational side of existence" (quoted by Lou Andreas-Salomé, op. cit., p. 16). Cf. a letter to Brandes,
