III
When Nietzsche attempts to make anything definite of his social and political views, to form plans or make forecasts, he is perhaps not more at sea than most thinkers with ideal constructions who are unable to connect themselves with existing tendencies. He was fully aware that he was not in harmony with his time (unzeitgemäss); he really looked at the world from afar. In a sense he was more mediæval than modern, even more Greek than mediæval, and, I might almost say, more Asiatic (at least Hindu) than Greek.[1] Perhaps there never was a more undemocratic thinker. It is only the notion of progress that he takes from the modern (shall I say? Christian) world, and this he practically reverses; for progress to him is not, as to most of us, towards universal liberty, equality, fraternity, but towards a graded society, a pyramidal form of existence, with the mass at the foundation and men like Gods at the top.
He has accordingly a full sense of the gravity of the situation—for him. Not only are political tendencies and social sentiments against him, but morality (as commonly conceived) is. He distinguishes himself also from "free-thinkers"—they too are levelers.[2] g He faces the (to him) depressing possibility, that mankind, by following its present watchwords of "humanity," "sympathy," "pity" (i.e., taking them absolutely, not relatively and circumspectly) may become a fixed type like any defined animal species—for hitherto the human type has not been fixed.[3] How, he asks, out of the European as he is now developing—a most intelligent sort of slave-animal, very laborious, at bottom very modest, curious to excess, multiform, spoiled by too much tenderness, weak in will, a cosmopolitan chaos
- ↑ Nietzsche once says, as if to indicate what he conceived to be the line of progress: "Step by step to become more comprehensive, more super-natural, more European, more super-European, more Oriental, finally more Greek—for the Greek was the first great combination and synthesis of all Oriental elements, and thereby the beginning of the European soul" (Will to Power, § 1051).
- ↑ Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 44.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 66-7, § 132; cf. XIT, 120, § 235. The flock as such tends to select those who fit into it, guarding itself alike against those who fall below and those who rise above it, i.e., to produce a fixed, stationary type—there is nothing creative about it (Will to Power, § 285).
