ing others can learn to command himself, and that such ripe, self-legislating individuals may well have spheres of life and interest strictly their own.
The difficulty is in making out how individuals so separated from society can be organically related to it. For Nietzsche carries the thought of independence very far. He distinguishes one who belongs to his higher self from one who belongs to his office or his family or to society.[1] He counts as individual activity neither the activity of a merchant, nor that of the official, nor that of the scholar, nor that of the statesman.[2] To him the teacher is not yet an individual, and is indeed in danger of losing his proper self: "he who is thoroughly a teacher takes all things seriously only in relation to his pupils—indeed, even himself."[3] Nothing is rarer than a personal action.[4] Personal life is something independent of social effects. When Buckle attacked the theory that "great men" are the levers and causes of great movements, he misconceived them, for the "higher nature" of the great man is in his different being, in his incommunicableness, in the distance involved in his rank (Rangdistanz)—not in any effects that go out from him, not even if the earth shook.[5] y His worth lies so little in his utility, that it would exist just the same if there were no one to whom he could be useful—and it is not impossible that he might have a harmful influence, others perishing of envy of him.[6] Indeed, to estimate the value of a man by his use to others, his cost or his injury to them, has as much and as little sense as to estimate a work of art by the effects it produces.[7] Morality itself (as has been noted in another connection) does not affect this value of a man—does not touch the question; and whether we preach the ruling morality or criticise it, such preoccupation shows that we belong essentially to the flock (rather than to ourselves), even if, as its highest necessity, a
- ↑ Werke, XT, 216, § 145.
- ↑ Human, etc., § 283.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 63.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 886.
- ↑ Ibid., § 876.
- ↑ Ibid., § 877. It may be a part of the very greatness of a man that others cannot draw advantage from him (cf. what is said of Goethe, Twilight etc., ix, § 50).
- ↑ Will to Power, § 878.
