CHAPTER VII
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS
Nietzche's moral aim became practically, as we have seen, a striving for a new culture. Some consequences in the social and political field are now to be noted.
I
One is the sanction he feels obliged to give to slavery. Wherever there has been anything like culture or civilization in the world, something like slavery has been at its basis. It is so now. The current phrase "factory slave" is not a mere metaphor. When an individual works for others' good rather than his own, and has to, whether the compelling force is that of a personal master or of circumstances over which he has no control, slavery exists in principle.[1] It is not a thing in which, as one might imagine from current representations of Nietzsche, he takes pleasure, but rather one of those forbidding facts which give a problematical character to existence in general. The only apology for slavery is that the possibility of attaining the higher ends of human existence is bound up with it. Culture—meaning now broadly any social state in which man rises above his natural life as an animal and pursues ends like philosophy and art—does not come at will, but is strictly conditioned. As before stated, it is the fruit of leisure; and that there may be leisure for some, others must work more than their share. a Such a necessity goes against our instincts of humanity and justice, and many have been led to rebel against it. We read of Emerson making a modest attempt in this direction. It was in the days of the Anti-Slavery agitation and he had been urging, with a somewhat larger view than the abolitionists ordinarily took, "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the
- ↑ Nietzsche's broad use of the term "slave" becomes even more conspicuous later, see pp. 127, 249-50, 442-3.
