content of it; we get even our idea of ourselves from others, and the way we judge ourselves only continues others, combined judgment of others.[1] In other words, human beings in society tend to be standardized, averaged; "so arises necessarily the sand of humanity, all very like one another, very small, very round, very peaceable, very tiresome."[2] Indeed, since society is a prime condition of existence for the human animal, it must be admitted that when survival for a given society depends on the preponderance of certain average characteristics in it, persons are a kind of waste, a luxury, and wishing for them has no sense.[3] What would be the use of a sheep's becoming a person, or an ant's? Its whole function (unless it is a leader of the flock or community) is to be the scarcely distinguishable unit of the mass that it is and to continue the type.
II
And yet persons do occasionally arise in human society—at least there are attempts in that direction. How does it happen? Nietzsche thinks in the first place that for all that may be said of the socializing, standardizing process, each human being is at bottom in some way peculiar. Schopenhauer had held that, while among the lower orders of being there was no essential difference between individuals, the species alone being particular and peculiar, each man is himself a "particular idea," "an altogether peculiar idea"; and Nietzsche, at least for a time, followed him.[4] Never did he believe that men were born free and equal, but he recognized that they were born different. "The habit of seeing resemblances, of finding things the same is a mark of weak eyes." This is said in commenting on the effort often made to harmonize contrasted thinkers—which only shows, he adds, that one has not the eye for what happens but once, and stamps one as mediocre.[5] But it holds, in his view, of
- ↑ Werke, XI, 236, § 191; cf. Dawn of Day, § 105.
- ↑ Werke, XI, 237, § 193.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 886.
- ↑ Cf. Human, etc., § 286. Perhaps I should say "always." In Joyful Science he still calls it the goal that "every one should draw his pattern of life and realize it—his individual pattern," and says that his kind of ethics would ever more and more take from man his general character and specialize him.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 228.
