thoroughly the one is desired, the more thoroughly the other is attained."[1]
IV
If a view like this strikes us strangely, still more strange will seem what is said of cruelty. Cruelty might be called evil carried to the highest power; it is "disinterested malice," or, in the language of Spinoza, sympathia malevolens.[2] The cruel man not only produces harm and suffering, he likes to. Nietzsche remarks that one may cause suffering to another, without meaning to—this being often the case with the strong; but that weak persons evilly-minded want to produce suffering and to see the signs of it.[3] Still the strong may be cruel too.
Probably nothing in Nietzsche's teaching has given more offense than his supposed advocacy of cruelty—Professor Riehl speaks of it as a morbid trait in his character.[4] But his attitude in the first instance is that of the psychological and historical analyst. There are no signs of his having been in the ordinary sense of the word a cruel man. I shall speak of this later in discussing his views of pity. Once he calls it our hereditary sin that we enjoy little, saying that if we learned better how to enjoy, we should unlearn giving and meditating pain to others.[5] Plainly this indicates no natural sympathy with cruelty. It is another thing, however, to say that there is no place for it in the world.
Cruelty is willing infliction of suffering—or at least, willingness to witness it. Let us note first what Nietzsche says of suffering, then of the infliction of it. Schopenhauer had used the facts of suffering as an argument against the world. Christianity also finds suffering an objection—its ideal is of an order in which "there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain."[6] Nietzsche
- ↑ Will to Power, § 1027.
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 6.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 371. On the need of decadents and the nervously weak for spice (Pfeffer) and even cruelty, cf. Will to Power, § 119.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 98.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, iii. Cf. other passages cited later in the discussion of pity, pp. 303-4.
- ↑ Apocalypse, xxi, 4. Cf. Nietzsche's comment on Christianity, Will to Power, § 1025.
