shaping itself in his mind, though at first tentatively and questioningly. Communities, as we have seen, are the raison d'être of morality—without them and their fixed norms (Sitten), it would never have arisen. The individual is looked at as existing for the community, as a function or functionary of it—apart from it he really means nothing, nothing of importance: such, in abstracto, is morality's standpoint. But just here Nietzsche finds himself questioning. Is this social [moral] significance all that a man has? Has he no properly individual being and value? May there not be acts of no advantage to society and still well worth while? He has a reflection like the following: There are certain things which we cannot do as members of society, though we may as private individuals, e.g., show mercy to a breaker of the law; it is something which endangers society—society as such cannot do it or sanction it, though it may leave certain favored individuals free to do it (the king or executive), and we may all be happy when the privilege is exercised, though glad in our private hearts rather than as citizens.[1] The idea of a possible significance which is purely individual appears still more clearly in the following: "The active class of men lack ordinarily the higher type of activity; I mean the individual. They are active as officials, business men, scholars, i.e., as members of a species, but not as quite definite individuals and single men; in this respect they are lazy."[2] The paragraph closes: "All men may be classed, now as in all times, as slave and free; for whoever does not have three-fourths of the day to himself is a slave, whatever else he may be—statesman, business man, official, or scholar." We have already observed his feeling about society's turning men into functionaries to defend it against crime; but if man's being is in his social functioning, why should our "higher humanity" be hurt, and what is the sense in speaking of "sacrifice"? There is the same implication in a distinction he makes, in speaking of factory slavery and organization, between a person and a screw—the underlying thought being that a screw is for others' uses, a person for his own.[3]
Indeed Nietzsche once raises a strange question (strange
