find the law that suits them. There is a law for them as truly as there is one for society, but they do not hit it—and their impulses, still to be trained and unified in the service of the new aim, conflict with one another, or, if one gets on top, it sets up a tyranny, the others being not so much regulated as crushed.[1] Even so, they are fuller, richer, greater than the ordinary man; but regulation, organization are lacking and so they fail. Nietzsche once drops a despairing remark to the effect that man is not yet good enough for a flight in the air, out of the reach and criticism of others. He cites as examples of higher men who lacked the supreme qualities—strong, rich, but without self-control—Byron, Alfred de Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Heinrich von Kleist, Gogol; he says he could mention greater names. He calls men of this type "rudimentary men"—that is, they are anticipations, beginnings, in the higher direction, but no more.[2]
And yet there are those who do not go to pieces—at least sooner or later such appear. They can not only command, they can obey—a principle of order and subordination is established in them.[3] They represent the opposite of the demoralization sometimes produced by freedom—for Zarathustra says, "Alas, I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope, and then they denied all high hopes; they lived shamelessly in momentary pleasures and scarcely had aims beyond the day.… Once they thought to become heroes; now they are voluptuaries!"[4] They are men able to say Yes, not only in word but in deed, to Zarathustra's challenge, "Canst thou give thyself thy evil and thy good, and hang up thy will over thee as a law?"[5] They not merely know themselves, but they follow a still greater injunction, "Will [make] a self"—they give their nature a style, mold it, bring it under a law, become masters of their wildness, unbridledness, know both how to speak and how to keep silent, are capable of hardness and severity against
- ↑ Cf. ibid., XII, 119, § 233; 114, § 226.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 269; Werke, XII, 119, § 233. Nietzsche remarks that after seeing the tragedy of these "higher men," we are impelled to seek relief and healing in the company of ordinary well-conducted people.
- ↑ Zarathustra, III, xii, § 4.
- ↑ Ibid., I, viii.
- ↑ Ibid., I, xvii.
