the old attitude recurs—and stands out clearer, and more assured than ever.
"When half-gods go,
The gods arrive."
Wagner had gone, the early illusions about him had vanished; but the transcendent vision of superhuman excellence which Nietzsche had momentarily identified with that great figure survived.
II
"Superman" is a poetic designation for great individuals carried to their utmost human limit, for "persons" in the full sense of that term. a Superman is man as he might be—not another species, but our very human flesh and blood transfigured. As Professor Simmel, one of the critical writers on Nietzsche who has penetrated most deeply into his thought, puts it, "The superman is nothing but the crystallization of the thought that man can develop beyond the present stage of his existence—and hence should."[1] Zarathustra has scanned the great men of history, and the greatest of them are, like the smallest men, "all-too-human"; "there has never yet been a superman."[2] Individuals like Alcibiades, Cæsar, Frederick II, Leonardo da Vinci, Cæsar Borgia, Napoleon, Goethe, Bismarck are approximations to the type, but all come short somewhere—they were men of power, took great and fearful responsibilities, but were spoiled by some defect.[3] Zarathustra is spoken of by Nietzsche as an incorporation of the ideal,[4] but Zarathustra is an imaginary figure—and, as portrayed, he himself looked beyond.
Nietzsche once puts his problem, and incidentally reveals his understanding of the new phrase, thus: Dismissing the current individualistic morality along with the collectivistic, since the former, like the latter, fails to recognize an order of
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 235; cf. pp. 5, 6.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, iv.
- ↑ Napoleon, Goethe, Stendhal, Heine, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Balzac are once spoken of as "good Europeans" (i.e., super-national) and a kind of "higher men," but not deep and original enough for a philosophy such as Nietzsche craves (Beyond Good and Evil, § 256).
- ↑ Ecce Homo, III, vi, § 6.
