mass of humanity, whose struggles and mutual helpfulness are surely not their own end, is, to those who think with Nietzsche, the emergence of the rarer, higher types preferred to—men who, relatively speaking, will be like Gods on the earth, and once more awaken a sentiment all unfamiliar to our democratic age—reverence.
Nietzsche remarks that the philosopher, in the deeper sense of that word, has ever found himself, and has had to find himself, in opposition to the day in which he lives—his enemy has been the ideal of that day; and it is so now. Against the wild waters of selfishness that were pouring their tumultuous floods in the sixteenth century arose the ideal of a meek, renouncing, selfless humanity. In face of the degenerate aristocratic Athenian society of the fifth century B.C., and against the old high-sounding phrases to the use of which the nobility had forfeited their right by the kind of life they were leading, Socrates stood forth and practised his irony. And now when gregariousness is supreme, when "equality of rights" is preached and easily passes into equality of wrongs, now, when there is a general war against everything exceptional and privileged, a philosopher is needed with a new antithesis—one who will say that greatness consists in standing alone, in taking duties and responsibilities that cannot be common, in being greatly one's very particular and individual self.[1]
V
Let me now give Nietzsche's conception of great men a little more in detail. Though, as persons proper, they are not easily subsumable under a common type, certain very general common characteristics may be noted.
First, they are great, not by carrying ordinary virtues to a high state of perfection; their virtues are more or less different from the ordinary, for they are different men. To a certain extent they come under the same law with others; but the characteristic thing about them is that they have a law of their own, one suitable to their peculiar being. Their virtues might not be virtues for the common man, and the virtues of the common man might conceivably be vices (weaknesses) in them.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 212.
