consistency] as to say, "much is more highly prized by the living being than life itself"; and again, "men have become so pitiable that even the philosophers do not notice the deep contempt with which antiquity and the middle ages treated this 'self-evident value of values, life.'"[1] Have we then a contradiction? Verbally, yes; but not really in thought. The fact is that "life" may be taken in two senses: on the one hand it may mean the inner active process already described, on the other, something static and external, mere existence. Nietzsche implies the two meanings and puts the matter in a nutshell, when he says that to risk life is not to despise it, but rather to lift it to a higher potency.[2] i The supreme act of life (in one sense) may be to lose it (in another). Even the life of the species, in the sense of its mere continued existence, is not the end to Nietzsche.[3] The great man, the genius, the superman, the final raisan d'être of the species, is himself a prodigal (Verschwender)—that he spends himself is his greatness; the instinct of self-preservation is suspended in him, the mighty urge of the forces streaming out through him forbidding every such care and precaution.[4]
V
A word as to the objectivity of Nietzsche's standard. He is sometimes said to give us only a subjective arbitrary moraity,[5] being compared to the Greek Sophists who denied all objective norms. The element of truth in such a view we have already seen—all morality is, according to him, the result of subjective demand somewhere; but in another way it contains more error than truth. Though ends are set by the intelligent
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, xii; Werke, XI, 223, § 159.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 929.
- ↑ Ibid., § 864.
- ↑ Twilight etc., ix, § 44; cf. Werke, XIV, 335, § 178. O. Külpe leaves this out of account when he speaks of life at any price as Nietzsche's supreme value (Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland, 3rd ed., p. 65). Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's own short life, inspired and productive as it was, was better than a long, healthy life, filled with moderate labors (Jahrbuch für das classische Alterthum, Vol. V, p. 727).
- ↑ Cf. Arthur Drews, op. cit., p. 312.
("a living thing will above all expend its force—self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results of this"); Werke, XIV, 314, § 146 (mankind a mass of force, which grows and must spend itself).
