shepherd.[1] "We must give men courage for a new and great form of contempt—of the rich, for example, of officials and so forth: every unpersonal form of life must rank as common and despicable."[2] "My thought: ends are lacking and these must be individual. We see the universal driving: everybody is sacrificed and serves as instrument. Let one go through the streets and ask if it is not pure 'slaves' whom one meets. To what end? For what purpose?"[3]
Undoubtedly the difficulty of reconciling all this with an organic view is considerable; Nietzsche's "great individuals" seem separate from society rather than a part of it. And yet he speaks of the three classes as "mutually conditioning each other" (sich gegenseitig bedingende)—and this strictly individual manner of existence is the most characteristic aspect of the first class.
Perhaps a way out is in conceiving the organic in a some. what different manner from the ordinary. As commonly understood, an organism is something in which all the parts are in turn means and ends. But might there not be an organism in which certain parts only are ends, and the rest means to them? Is the common conception perhaps an unconscious reflection of our prevailing social ideals—a democratic idiosyncrasy? and may an aristocratic conception (if we please to term it so) be just as biological and scientific? However this may be, it is plain what Nietzsche's view is. Great individuals alone are, to his mind, ends proper, and they cannot possibly be turned into means to ends beneath them; others are equally means and cannot possibly be conceived as ends, though existence and happy functioning may well, indeed must, be assured to them. If the higher kind of men can be said at all to serve the common run of us, it is not in a material way, but in giving a possible justification to us, a possible meaning to our existence. With them in view or in prospect, taking our place in a social process which tends to produce them, we can lift up our heads, if ever depression and doubt come to us as to whether our life is worth while,—and perhaps there could be no greater service in the world to us than this.z
