his thought being that they are all social functionaries, i.e., serve something outside them, rather than themselves.[1] He calls the French Revolution the "last great slave-insurrection" [the beginning of it],[2] and the French Revolution was the uprising of the bourgeois rather than the working class. In the intellectual world itself, he finds slaves and masters. The scholar, the purely scientific and objective man, who simply mirrors things and events, is a valuable tool, but a tool all the same, "a bit of a slave," though of a sublimated kind—and belongs in the hands of the masters in the intellectual realm, the philosophers.[3] Nietzsche even carries the distinction into the realm of morality. "He who cannot make himself an end, or in general project ends of himself, gives honor to an unegoistie morality—instinctively": he serves others, takes as his rules common rules—that is, is so far a slave, though "the ideal slave."[4] What we particularly think of when we speak of a "good man" today is a combination of qualities fitting to the slave. "Modest, industrious, benevolent, frugal—so you wish man, the good man, to be! But such an one appears to me only the ideal slave, the slave of the future."[5] One might say then that if workingmen are slaves, they are in what would ordinarily be called good company. There is of course always a shade of contempt in Nietzsche's use of the term, but it is from a very lofty standpoint—one to which only those are "free" who have their reason for being in themselves and represent the summits of humanity, the rest doing their best as they "serve" them, above all, as they will to serve them, and in so willing rob their servitude of half or all its baseness.[6] For in one way Nietzsche saw nothing reproachful in slavery, even of
- ↑ Werke, XII, 205, § 439.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 46.
- ↑ Ibid., § 207; cf. Will to Power, § 358.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 358.
- ↑ Ibid., § 356. Nietzsche finds slavery everywhere visible, even though unconfessed, and adds that it is not to be extirpated, being necessary; we have only to see that there are those worthy to receive its benefits, so that this vast mass of politico-commercial forces is not used up in vain (Werke, XII, 203, § 433; cf. Human, etc., § 585).
- ↑ Either society, or the higher man, who is the ultima ratio of society, may be the object of the service; though Nietzsche is of the opinion that when the higher man is not in evidence, or at least in prospect, life, and the service, too, are on little more than an animal level.
