every one can help himself, and he himself decide whether he shall be helped."[1] Helping, he feels, is a delicate business; if the impulse to it were twice as strong as it is, life might become unendurable for many. Let a man think, he says, of the foolish things he is doing daily and hourly from solicitude for himself, and then what would happen if he became the object of a similar solicitude from others—why, we should want to flee when a "neighbor" approached![2] What has done more harm than the follies of the compassionate? asks Zarathustra.[3] Benevolence must be newly appraised, and the limitless injury perceived that is continually worked by benevolent acts—for example, what a subject for irony is the love of mothers![4] In short, pity is dangerous; it must be held within limits, intelligence must master it—it must be habitually sifted by reason.[5]
I pass over the further and more detailed analysis of pity. At bottom it is not unlike the analysis of love and sacrifice, although it of course brings out the specific features of pity, such as that it is the opposite of admiration and means a looking down, and hence should be practised with shame, not publicly, out of regard for its object.[6] Nietzsche is, to my recollection, the first moralist to point out the lack of delicacy in pity as often shown, its intrusiveness—so that to be protected from it is the instinct of many a fine nature, and a certain purification is necessary for us after we have shown it, inasmuch as we have gazed on another in suffering, and, in helping him, have hurt his pride.[7] k
IV
What, then, are the limits for pity? If one stops to reflect a moment, one sees that an answer to the question depends upon what sort of an ideal one has in his mind; indeed, upon whether one has any ultimate ideal. Early Christianity, for
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 261, § 3.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 143.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, iii.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 212, § 493.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 928; Werke, XI, 270, § 276.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 135; Zarathustra, II, iii.
- ↑ Zarathustra, TV, viii; Ecce Homo, I, § 4; Beyond Good and Evil, § 270; Werke, XIV, 360, § 227; Zarathustra, II, iii.
