The Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1921. The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Horace B. Samuel. New York: Boni and Liveright.

We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves - how should it then come to pass, that we should ever find ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where your treason is, there will your heart be also." Our treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing - to bring something "home to the hive!" (Nietzsche 1921: i)

Soul searching or just looking for fights? I have been looking for myself for nearly a decade. Implicit in this is the gregariousness of beehives (cf. Trotter 1921: 203-204).

Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity to motto, "Each one is the farthest away from himself" - as far as ourselves are concerned we are not "knowers." (Nietzsche 1921: ii)

Beautiful, if unsustantiated. It sounds like a reversal of "know thyself" - such a slogan would be unnecessary if we already knew ourselves or if it were as easy a task as glancing in the mirror.

The issue was, strangely enough, the value of the "unegoistic" instincts, the instincts of pity, self-denial, and self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had so persistently painted in golden colours, deified and etherealised, that eventially they appeared to him, as it were, high and dry, as "intrinsic values in themselves," on the strength of which he uttered both to Life and to himself his own negation. But against these very instincts there voiced itself in my soul a more and more fundamental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper and deeper: and in this very instinct I saw the great danger of mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction - seduction to what? to nothingness? - in these very instincts I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes backwards, the will turning against Life, the last illness announcing itself with its own mincing melancholy: I realised that the morality of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our modern European civilisation; I realised that it was the route along which that civilisation slid on its way to - a new Buddhism? - a European Buddhism? - Nihilism? This exaggerated estimation in which modern philosophers have held pity, is quite a new phenomenon: up to that time philosophers were absolutely unanimous as to the worthlessness of pity. I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rouchefoucauld, and Kant - four minds [|] as mutually different as is possible, but united on one point; their contempt of pity. (Nietzsche 1921: vii-viii)

Durkheim and Malinowski appear to share in this contempt for pity: "mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions" (Durkheim 1915: 397); "where [the purpose of establishing a common sentiment] purports to exist, as in expressions of sympathy, it is avowedly spurious on one side" (PC 2.3).

Enough, that after this vista had disclosed itself to me, I myself had reason to search for learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am doing it even to this very day). (Nietzsche 1921: ix)

The loneliness of industrious minds.

I, on the other hand, think that there are no subjects which pay better for being taken seriously; part of this payment is, that perhaps eventually they admit of being taken gaily. This gaiety, indeed, or, to use my own language, this joyful wisdom, is a payment; a payment for a protracted, brave, laborious, and burrowing seriousness, which, it goes without saying, is the attribute of but a few. (Nietzsche 1921: x)

Moral problems should not be taken seriously, they should be taken gaily.

Those English psychologists, who up to the present are the only philosophers who are to be thanked for any endeavour to get as far as a history of the origin of morality - these men, I say, offer us in their own personalities no paltry problem; - they even have, if I am to be quite frank about it, in their capacity of living riddles, an advantage over their books - they themselves are interesting! These English psychologists - what do they really mean? We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the partie honteuse of our inner world, and looking for the efficient, governing, and decisive principle in that precise quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be the most reluctant to find it (for example, in the vis inertiæ of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid) - what is the real motive power which always impels these psychologists in precisely this direction? (Nietzsche 1921: 1)

So it is. The examples constitue a rundown of common tropes in early British psychology.

Now the first argument that comes ready to my hand is that the real homestead of the concept "good" is sought and located in the wrong place: the judgment "good" did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, in cotradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian. (Nietzsche 1921: 3-4)

The aristocracy vs. the "uneducated classes" (PC 4.3).

The standpoint of utility is as alien and as inapplicable as it could possibly be, when we have to deal with so volcanic an effervescence of supreme values, creating and demarcating as they do a hierarchy within themselves: it is at this juncture that one arrives at an appreciation of the contrast to that tepid temperature, which is the presupposition on which every combination of worldly wisdom and every calculation of practical expediency is always based - and not for one occasional, not for one exceptional instance, but chronically. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the chronic and despotic esprit de corps and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race coming into association with a mean race, an "under race," this is the origin of the antithesis of good and bad. (Nietzsche 1921: 4)

A crucial piece of the puzzle, "The importance of the esprit de corps, of the interaction of various group-loyalties within the same individual, and of the hierarchy of groups and group-loyalties is very well brought out" (Malinowski 1921b: 107).

The masters' right of giving names goes so far that it is permissible to look upon language itself as the expression of the power of the masters: they say "this is that, and that," they seal finally every object and every event with a sound, and thereby at the same time take possession of it. (Nietzsche 1921: 4)

The power of naming, something familiar enough from Foucault's oeuvre.

It is because of this origin that the word "good" is far from having any necessary connection with altruistic acts, in accordance with the superstitious belief of these moral philosophers. On the contrary, it is on the occasion of the decay of aristocratic values, that [|] the antitheses between "egoistic" and "altruistic" presses more and more heavily on the human conscience - it is, to use my own language, the herd instinct which finds in this antithesis an expression in many ways. And even then it takes a considerable time for this instinct to become sufficiently dominant, for the valuation to be inextricably dependent on this antithesis (as is the case in contemporary Europe); for to-day the prejudice is predominant, which, acting even now with all the intensity of an obsession and brain disease, holds that "moral," "altruistic," and désintressé" are concepts of equal value. (Nietzsche 1921: 4-5)

Sadly this is not the work wherein he clarifies his conception of herd instinct. "Yet it is precisely here that the current theory intervenes, and assumes the presence of another primary emotion, Pity, to account for the fact of disinterestedness; and then regards that as the sole source of disinterested action" (Shand 1914: 47).

Who can guarantee that modern democracy, still more modern anarchy, and indeed that tendency to the "Commune," the most primitive form of society, which is now common to all the Socialists in Europe, does not in its real essence signify a monstrous reversion - and that the conquering and master race - the Aryan race, is not also becoming inferior physiologically? (Nietzsche 1921: 9)

Just recently I worried about the relation of "commune" and "communion". Recall that the "primitive [...] is surpassed by no others in simplicity" (Durkheim 1915: 1). Is the commune the most simple form of society?

Moreover, care should be taken not to take these ideas of "clean" and "unclean" too seriously, too broadly, or too symbolically: all the ideas of ancient man have, on the contrary, got to be understood in their initial stages, in a sense which is, to an almost inconceivable extent, crude, coarse, physical, and narrow, and above all essentially unsymbolical. The "clean man" is originally only a man who washes himself, who abstains from certain foods which are conducive to skin diseases, who does not sleep with the unclean women of the lower classes, who has a horror of blood - not more, not much more! (Nietzsche 1921: 10)

For all intents and purposes, "The aborigenes are not able to think exactly, and their beliefs do not possess any "exact meaning."" (Malinowski 1913: 213).

While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself"; and this "no" is its creative deed. (Nietzsche 1921: 17)

"The stranger who cannot speak the language is to all savage tribesmen a natural enemy" (PC 4.2). In comparison, there is a certain reversal in this, again, as one would expect from Foucault or Freud. The latter employs this in an especially odd fashion, writing that empathy, instead of "sembling" (manifesting what is common to ourselves and others; i.e. communization), plays on "our understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people" (Freud 1922: 66).

Granted the truth of the theory now believed to be true, that the very essence of all civilisation is to train out of man, the beast of prey, a tame and civilised animal, a domesticated animal, it follows indubitably that we must regard as the real tools of civilisation all those instincts of reaction and resentment, by the help of which the aristocratic races, together with their ideals, were finally degraded and overpowered; though that has not yet come to be synonymous with saying that the bearers of those tools also represented the civilisation. (Nietzsche 1921: 24)

"Humans alone are fetalized, domesticated hyper-mammals with the necessary oral-dependent and intensified sexual traits" (La Barre 1954: 166-167).

And is that our fate? What produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"? - for we suffer from "man," there is no doubt about it. It is not fear; it is rather that we have nothing more to fear from men; it is that the worm "man" is in the foreground and pullulates; it is that the "tame man," the wretched mediocre and unedifying creature, has learnt to consider himself a goal and a pinnacle, an inner meaning, an historic principle, a "higher man"; yes, it is that he has a certain right so to consider himself, in so far as he feels that in contrast to thta excess of deformity, disease, exhaustion, and effeteness whose odour is beginning to pollute present-day Europe, he at any rate has achieved a relative success, he at any rate still says "yes" to life. (Nietzsche 1921: 25)

"The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center of the universe. Then the sun came down out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots." (Huxley's Island). As to "saying "yes" to life", this must have inspired the grandfather of biosemiotics to formulate "affirmation of life" (see Andrews in SSS about the guy who studied symmetry and asymmetry in the body).

For the position is this: in the dwarfing and levelling of the European man lurks our greatest peril, for it is this outlook which fatigues - we see to-day nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that the process is always still backwards, still backwards towards something more attenuated, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian man, there is no doubt about it, grows always "better" - the destiny of Europe lies even in this - that in losing the fear of man, we have also lost the hope in man, yea, the will to be man. The sight of man now fatigues. - What is present-day Nihilism if it is not that? - We are tired of man. (Nietzsche 1921: 26)

I have to say it because it cannot be steadily ignored: Nietzsche's general positions are detestably edgy. How long is the step from discussing the social disintegration of Western cizilisation with such self-assuredness (ignoring all empirical data of social progress, as proper conservatives should) to conspiratorial theories of white genocide? It certainly seems that he's pandering to the same intellectualized sense of fear for the herd subscribed and evoked by neo-Nazis and the alt-right. I wonder if I should take a look an Nikolai II's favourite night-cubboard book, or Trump's, for that matter?

Oh no, I must now affirm that other, critical self of future me that I am not virtue-signalling but merely researching the uglier side of the history of ideas in social philosophy. "I had to read Spencer, despite no-one, I was is affirmed, reading Spencer by the 1920s," I plead to no significant avail. I sometimes think of that smooth fellow who goes to an academic library to borrow Mein Kampf "for research purposes", simultaneously arousing and alarming the librarian. Was it a sign of the times? What is the extent of U.S. right wing activist's influence in my country's modern history?

To require of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it shuld not be a wish to overpower, a wish to overthrow, a wish to become master, a thirst for enemies and antagonisms and triumphs, is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength. (Nietzsche 1921: 27)

Yuup. Some themes are just self-evident.

And just exactly as the people separate the lightning from [|] its flash, and interpret the latter as a thing done, as the working of a subject which is called lightning, so also does the popular morality separate strength from the expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed some indifferent neutral substratum, which enjoyed a caprice and option as to whether or not it should express strength. But there is no such substratum, there is no "being" behind doing, working, becoming; "the doer" is a mere appanage to the action. The action is everything. In point of fact, the people duplicate the doing, when they make the lightning lighten, that is a "doing-doing"; they make the same phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause. The scientists fail to improve matters when they say. "Force moves, force causes," and so on. Our whole science is still, in spite of all its coldness, of all its freedom from passion, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has ever succeeded in getting rid of that superstitious changeling "the subject" (the atom, to give another instance, is such a changeling, just as the Kantian "Thing-in-itself"). (Nietzsche 1921: 27-28)

The complications of power and possibly a pragmatic theory stemming from physics, a la Mach and Avenarius. Wittgenstein, in the same sequence (i.e. congenially with Malinowski), also ascribes such philosophical problems to the tricks of language, as I've heard and will hopefully find out soon enough. "The will of language"

All the sciences have now to pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to mean, that he must solve the problem of value, that he has to fix the hierarchy of values. (Nietzsche 1921: 39)

And that philosopher's name? Charles Morris.

The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his standard of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises), - that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the "teeth of fate," - so with equal necessity will he have to heed of his foot ready for the [|] lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct - what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it - the sovereign man calls it his conscience. (Nietzsche 1921: 43-44)

The pathos of nobility and distance sure is not respectful of the uneducated poor underclasses, emaciated and offering empty promises of return. There's a distinct substratum of aristocratic economic thinking noticeable throughout the works of Malinowski and his peers. See all the ravings about altruism and utilitarianism, the latter possibly having to do with the destable notion of acting for the greater good, paying one's taxes, and so on. How can you possibly understand disinterestedness if you are thinking only of self-interest?

In a certain sense the whole of asceticism is to be ascribed to this: certain ideas have got to be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, "fixed," with the object of hypnotising the whole nervous and intellectual system through these "fixed ideas" - and the ascetic methods and modes of life are the means of freeing those ideas from the competition of all other ideas so as to make them "unforgettable." The worse memory man [|] had, the ghastlier the signs presented by his customs; the severity of the penal laws affords in particular a gauge of the extent of man's difficulty in conquering forgetfulness, and in keeping a few primal postulates of social intercourse ever present to the minds of those who were the slaves of every momentary emotion and every momentary desire. (Nietzsche 1921: 45-46)

"Rigid custom is the cement of society in the ages preceding the formation of a moral tradition, and the breaking of the rigid bonds of custom, bonds which were probably essential for the preservation of primitive societies, was the prime condition of the growth of the moral tradition of the progressive nations" (McDougall 1916: 220).

Alas! reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these privileges and pageantries of humanity: how dear is the price that they have exacted! How much blood and cruelty is the foundation of all "good things"! (Nietzsche 1921: 47)

"In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal subject of this volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses." (Dewey 1910: 1-2) - Why must Nietzsche be so gloomy?

In my opinion it is repugnant to the delicacy, and still more to the hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (that is, modern men; that is, ourselves), to realise with all their energy the extent to which cruelty constituted the great joy and delight of ancient man, was an ingredient which seasoned nearly all his pleasures, and conversely the extent of the naïveté and innocense with which he manifested his need for cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of principle "disinterested malice" (or, to use Spinoza's expression, the sympathia malevolens) into a normal characteristic of man - as consequently something to which the conscience says a hearty yes. (Nietzsche 1921: 52)

My first thought was, if sympathy has something to do with disinteredness for Nietzsche or his translator to make these equivalents. Evidently this is something that requires me, happily to undertake Human, All Too Human - "In social dialogue, three-quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit; this is why many men thirst after society so much: it gives them a feeling of their strength. In these countless, but very small doses, malevolence takes effect as one of life's powerful stimulants, just as goodwill, dispensed in the same way throughout the human world, is the perennially ready cure." (p. 50). - This discovery also affirms my conviction that this is a book I need to read different translations of (e.g. see here).

Sale and purchase, together with their psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form of social organisation and union: it is rather from the most rudimentary form of individual right that the budding consciousness of exchange, commerce, debt, right, obligation, compensation was first transferred to the rudest and most elementary of the social complexes (in their relations to similar complexes), the habin of comparing force with force, together with that of measuring, of calculating. (Nietzsche 1921: 58)

A wrench in the theories of social origin, or, an improvement upon "the socialising influence of the instinct of pugnacity" (McDougall 1916: 282-283) and yet another example of "aristocratic economic thinking" (cf. above).

Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of a community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them nowadays), man lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure from certain injuries and enmities, to which the man outside the community, the "peaceless" man, is exposed, - a German understands the original meaning of "Elend" (êlend), - secure because he has entered into pledges and obligations to the community in respect of these very injuries and enmities. (Nietzsche 1921: 59)

Body politick and sovereignty over violence.

The creditor has always grown more humane proportionately as he has grown more ruch; finally the amount of injury he can endure without really suffering becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible to conceive of a society blessed with so great a consciousness of its own power as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting its wrong-doers go scot-free. - "What do my parasites matter to me?" might society say. "Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for it." (Nietzsche 1921: 61)

And argument favoring taxes, and quite relevant to our coming ages of leisure. Can we afford the masses of people living on the earth and continuing to multiply to such an extent? Or should we do with a world government and 500 million people living well, with islands of isolated barbarians in places lacking resources?

Perhaps there is no more pregnant principle for any kind of history than the following, which, difficult though it is to master, should none the less be mastered in every detail. - The origin of the existence of a thing and its final utility, its practical application and incorporation in a system of ends are toto cælo opposed to each other - everything, anything, which exists and which prevails anywhere, will always be put to new purposes by a force superior to itself, will be commandeered afresh, will be turned and transformed to new uses; all "happening" in the organic world consists of overpowering and dominating is a new interpretation and adjustment, which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting "meaning" and "end." [|] The most perfect comprehension of the utilty of any physiological organ (or also of a legal institution, social custom, political habit, form in art or in religious worship) does not for a minute imply any simultaneous comprehension of its origin: this may seem uncomfortable and unpalatable to the older men, - for it has been the immemorial belief that understanding the final cause or the utility of a thing, a form, an institution, means also understanding the reason for its origin: to give an example of this logic, the eye was made to see, the hand was made to grasp. So even punishment was conceived as invented with a view to punishing. But all ends and all utilities are only signs that a Will to Power has mastered a less powerful force, has impressed thereon out of its own self the meaning of a function; and the whole history of a "Thing," an organ, a custom, can on the same principle be regarded as a continuous "sign-chain" of perpetually new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes, so far from needing to have even a mutual connection, sometimes follow and alternate with each other absolutely haphazard. (Nietzsche 1921: 66-67)

The second page of this excerpt is fully quotable, and will serve as a place to begin discussing hierarchical functionalism. It helps that this is by far the most semiotic passage in this book. I'm beginning to notice how loaded or pregnant with meaning "origin" has become to appear; Darwinian connotations always loom behind it.

With regard to the other element in punishment, its fluid element, its meaning, the idea of punishment in a very late stage of civilisation (for instance, contemporary Europe) is not content with manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole synthesis "of meanings." The past general history of punishment, the history of its employment for the most diverse ends, crystallises eventually into a kind of unity, which is difficult to analyse into its parts, and which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies definition. (Nietzsche 1921: 70)

Tähendus an voolav. What he is saying here is nearly the same as what he said of lightning (above), that is, that there is no substratum of ideation attached to action, action and its potential are identified, which anyone can realise, amounts to saying that punishment and the threat of punishment are the same, too. Of course one could object that the difficulty of disentangling the semiotics of power does not mean that it is impossible or fruitless to attempt to do so.

This list is certainly not complete; it is obvious that punishment is overloaded with utilities of all kinds. This makes it all the more permissible to eliminate one supposed utility, which passes, at any rate in the popular mind, for its most essential utility, and which is just what even now provides the strongest support for that faith in punishment which is nowadays for many reasons tottering. (Nietzsche 1921: 72)

Made me realise that the various "ends" or outcomes, whether desirable or not (as in the case of antipathy, though even this is debatable, given that malice is not an artifact but an essential factor in PC), could be itemized this way. This would be best achieved, I believe, when contemporaneous (JSTOR) articles were read to find other opinions about the functions of social conversation, so as not to limit the outlook to or colour it with the anthropologist's special interests and aversions towards the native informant.

But thereby he introduced that most grave and sinister illness, from which mankind has not yet recovered, the suffering of man from the disease called man, as the result of a violent breaking from his animal past, the result, as it were, of a spasmodic plunge into a new environment [|] and new conditions of existence, the result of a declaration of war against the old instincts, which up to that time had been the staple of his power, his joy, his formidableness. Let us immediately add that this fact of an animal ego turning against itself, taking part against itself, produced in the world so novel, profound, unheard-of, problematic, inconsistent, and pregnant a phenomenon, that the aspect of the world was radically altered thereby. (Nietzsche 1921: 77-78)

What is self-denial?

I used the word "State"; my meaning is self-evident, namely, a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the "State." That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is master by "nature," he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture - what has he to do with contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there as the lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too "different," to be personally even hated. (Nietzsche 1921: 79)

Perhaps one of the ugliest possible turns on "the stranger": he comes at you with an axe in his hand. While urinating on Voltaire, he fails to do more than affirm the bellum omnium contra omnes (in Hobbes).

What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women, at best an additional seductive fascination, a little morbidezza on a fine piece of flesd, an angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in physiological failures and whiners (in the majority of mortals), an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon in the battle with lingering pain and ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine for power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloriæ cupido, their peace in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. (Nietzsche 1921: 94)

Perhaps "communion" was chosen consciously in order to give PC the subtext of holy communion consisting of flatus vocis, a pathetic, pityful, grovelling, and self-serving form of discourse? See vanity.

This brings us, to the more serious question: What is the meaning of a real philosopher paying homage to the ascetic ideal, a really self-dependent intellect like Schopenhauer, a man and knife with a glance of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone without first waiting for men who cover him in front, and the nods of his superiors? (Nietzsche 1921: 101)

Is superman a philosopher? Or a philosopher-king? The pioneering sentiment is admirable but all too idealistic. I'd prefer the democratic sense of being philosopher, having only to produce a body of work with some increase of knowledge or wisdom as its goal.

In particular, Wagner from that time onwards (and this is the volte-face which alienates us the most) had no scruples [|] about changing his judgment concerning the value and position of music itself. What did he care if up to that time he had made of music a means, a medium, a "woman," that in order to thrive needed an end, a man - that is, the drama? He suddenly realised that more could be effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian theory in majorem musicæ floriam - that is to say, by means of the sovereignty of music, as Schopenhauer understood it; music abstracted from and opposed to all the other arts, music as the independent art-in-itself, not like the other arts, affording reflections of the phenomenal world, but rather than language of the will itself, speaking straight out of the "abyss" as its most personal, original, and direct manifestation. (Nietzsche 1921: 101-102)

Sovereignty stands here as an equivalent of Mukařovský's autonomy. This is the exact intellectual trickery I aim to expose with regard to what I call hierarchical functionalism and the peripatetic triad. / Väga huvitav on võimalus, et peripateetiline koolkond sai oma nime samast tüvest, sest pátos on "rada" (path) Serbia-Horvaatia keeltes ka põrand või veranda, millest vb ka "poodium" (vt patos). Seos tekkis sõnaga "hingeliigutus" (Gemütsbewegung). Pity tundub sellegipoolest pädevam kaasosaline, sest paatos "puudutab tundeid või eritab emotsioone ja kirgi, eriti kui neid, mida äratatakse hellade tunnetega, nagu kaastunne, kahetsus, jne. sooja või haleda tunde omadus" (vt pathos).

Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful, - the calming of the will, - but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned, Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted nature than Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect of the "beautiful." "The beautiful promises happiness." To him it is just the excitement of the will (the "interest") by the beauty that seems the essential fact. (Nietzsche 1921: 105)

Or, as Jakobson once put it in Polish, a work of art "works" if it grabs and arrests your attention with its beauty. Look up the etymological bifurcation of intention and attention (will and interest).

For we must certainly not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in practice treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its tool, woman, that "instrumentum diaboli"), needed enemies to keep him in a good humour; that he loved grim, bitter, blacking-green words; that he raged for the sake of raging, out of passion; that he would have grown ill, would have become a pessimist (for he was not a pessimist, however much he wished to be), without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuality, and the whole "will for existence" "keeping on." Without them Schopenhauer would not have "kept on," that is a safe wager; he would have run away: but his enemies held him fast, his enemies always enticed him back again to existence, his wrath was just as theirs was to the ancient Cynics, his balm, his recreation, his recompense, his remedium against disgust, his happiness. (Nietzsche 1921: 106)

Is this not an extension of sympathia malevolens?

These philosophers, you see, are by no means uncorrupted [|] witnesses and judges of the value of the ascetic ideal. They think of themselves - what is the "saint" to them? They think of that which to them personally is most indispensable; of freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise; freedom from business, duties, cares; of a clear head; of the dance, spring, and flight of thoughts; of good air - rare, clear, free, dry, as is the air on the heights, in which every animal creature becomes more intellectual and gains wings; they think of peace in every cellular; all the hounds neatly chained; no baying of enmity and uncouth rancour; no remorse of wounded ambition; quiet and submissive internal organs, busy as mills, but unnoticed; the heart alien, transcendent, future, posthumous - to summarise, they mean by the ascetic ideal the joyous asceticism of a deified and newly fledged animal, sweeping over life rather than resting. (Nietzsche 1921: 108-109)

Freedom from psychological interference and quasi-attention.

But that which Heracleitus shunned is still just what we too avoid nowadays: the noise and democratic babble of the Ephesians, their politics, their news from the "empire" (I mean, of course, Persia), their market-trade in "the things of to-day" - for there is one thing from which we philosophers especially need a rest - from the things of "to-day." We honour the silent, the cold, the noble, the far, the past, everything, in fact, at the sight of which the soul is not bound to brace itself up and defend itself - as something with which one can speak without speaking aloud. Just listen now to the tone of a spirit when it speaks; every spirit has its own tone and loves its own tone. That thing yonder, for instance, is bound to be an agitator, that is, a hollow head, a hollow mug: whatever may go into him, everything comes back from him dull and thick, heavy with the echo of the great void. That spirit yonder nearly always speaks hoarse: has he, perchance, thought himself hoarse? It may be so - ask the physiologists - but he who thinks in words, thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not think of objects or think objectively, but only of his relations with objects - that, in point of fact, he only thinks of himself and his audience). This third one speaks aggressively, he comes too near our bod, his breath blows on us - we shut our mouth involuntarily, although he speaks to us through a book: the tone of his style supplies the reason - he has no time, he has small faith in himself, he finds expression now or never. But a spirit who is sure of himself speaks softly; he seeks secrecy, he lets himself be awaited. (Nietzsche 1921: 111)

Is that Uexküll's Ego-Ton? Looking up The Meaning of Meaning, I caught myself reflecting that language can be used "as an instrument for thinking" and "for the communication of ideas", but these are not necessarily simultaneous processes, one does not have to communicate to operate language in the service of rational reflection, nor necessarily use language for it, as nonverbal and private signs as well as and post-language symbols suggest. Richards manages to put the stuff of thinking about oneself and one's audience into his interpretation of the social function (in Practical Criticism).

As for his humility, he endure, as he endures darkness, a certain dependence and obscurity: further, he is afraid of the shock of lightning, he shudders at the insecurity of a tree which is too isolated and too exposed, on which every storm vents its temper, every temper its storm. His "maternal" instinct, his secret love for that which grows in him, guides him into states where he relieved from the necessity of taking care of himself, in the same way in which the "mother" instinct in woman has thoroughly maintained up to the present woman's dependent position. After all, they demand little enough, do these philosophers, their favourite motto is, "He who possesses is possessed." All this is not, as I must say again and again, to be attributed to a virtue, to a meritorious wish for moderation and simplicity; but because their supreme lord so demands of them, demands wisely and inexorably; their lord who is eager only for one thing, for which alone he musters, and for which alone he heards everything - tim, strength, love, interest. This kind of man likes not to be disturbed by enmity, he likes not to be disturbed by friendship, it is a type which forgets or despises easily. (Nietzsche 1921: 112)

Self-care postulated as the extreme of selfishness? I do like the antimaterialist attitude of the "homeless philosopher" trope. Makes me think of the hypnopædic proverb, "ending is better than mending, ending" in Huxley's BNW, and P.O.S.'s "new shit - or fix what I have?" The point being that aescetic philosophers don't live a simple and moderate life because it's a virtue but because that's the easiest way to hoard time, strength, love, and interest for oneself. The last sentence, I must wonder, sounds like a more-or-less straightforward description of the pathos of nobility and distance, perhaps noble in not making enemies and distant in being disinterested in sociabilities and despising other people easily. There's enough known about Malinowski to make his own life an illustration, but then again, those English psychologists sure are interesting in themselves!

Just enumerate in order the particular tendencies and virtues of the philosopher - his tendency to doubt, his tendency to deny, his tendency to wait (to be "ephectic"), his tendency to analyse, search, explore, dare, his tendency to compare and to equalise, his will to be neutral and objective, his will for everything which is "sine ira et studio": has it yet been realised that for quite a lengthy period these tendencies went counter to the first claims of morality and conscience? (Nietzsche 1921: 115)

Define:ephectic - Wiki, school of skeptical thought in Classical antiquity, "given to suspense of judgment", "holding back". The Wikipedia article even contains a paragraph about Nietzsche criticizing the concept as a flaw in early philosophers prone to overindulging in doubting and negative drive that goes against the first demands of morality and conscience. If put like that it's a self-description, no? In other words, the Wiki paragraph quotes this very passage. The sine ira et studio, means "without anger and fondness" or "without hate and zealousness". As I put it when reading Senft (2009), the superficial relation with "emphasis" is far from being even a significant part of the whole etymological background of phatic communion. The Latin studio, 1. study; 2. eagerness, zeal; 3. desire, fancy; 4. pursuit is especially promising in the latter senses. Lack of desire or fancy mesh with the pathos of distance, but pursuit is more interesting, having a secondary meaning of "A hobby or recreational activity, done regularly." As I understand from French films, it is also used in the sense of "seeking contact" implied by the third sense, "(cycling) A discipline in track cycling where two opposing teams start on opposite sides of the track and try to catch their opponents", though this may be a bit of a stretch of the imagination. Latin ira is self-evident from English ire, it's a Proto-Indo-European word, e.g. Lithuanian aistrà ("violent passion"); it is anger and wrath, aggressive emotions. From both of these being, in a sense, extremes, I would guess the Latin proverb implies the pathos of nobility and distance in the sense of the golden mean, i.e. don't let your judgment be dictated by violent passions nor too much rumination, ideation, and ratiocination to make the judgment a PhD thesis. Maybe Nikomachus knows more. See als: "But if the meaning suggested is held in suspense, pending examination and inquiry, there is true judgment" (Dewey 1910: 107-108).

The soft, benevolent, yieding, sympathetic feelings - eventually valued so highly that they almost became "intrinsic values," were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors: gentleness was then a subject for shame, just as hardness is now (compare Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 260). (Nietzsche 1921: 116)

The gentleness/hardness dialectic could actually work for distinguishing malevolent sympathy from active sympathy. Yielding to what? The other's feelings. Soft ~ tender = sentiments. Something relevant from Human, All Too Human, Aph. 632: "If one has not passed through various convictions, but remains caught in the net of his first belief, he is in all events, because of just this unchangeability, a representative of backward cultures; in accordance with this lack of education (which always presupposes educability), he is harsh, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, eternally suspect, a person lacking scruples, who reaches for any means to enforce his opinion because he simply cannot understand that there have to be other opinions. In this regard, he is perhaps a source of power, and even salutary in cultures grown too free and lax, but only because he powerfully incites opposition: for in that way the new culture's more delicate structure, which is forced to struggle with him, becomes strong itself." - The gentle yields to various beliefs, the hard has ossified beliefs; unchangeability ~ lack of mental modification, unreceptive to new information, incurious; backward culture (circumstance) and lack of education (character) → the uneducated classes are unteachable, harsh, suspicious, without conscience, have an overall "bad character"; note the most important, enforcing one's own opinion by any means necessary because when the other person of speaking, the fool is thinking about what he is going to say next - it is a form of unreflexive communication with no mutual mental modification, no damn consensus, no mental communion, only that of speaking in each other's direction.

It must be a necessity of the first order which makes [|] this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again and always thrive again. - Life itself must certainly have an interest in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealosy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and secrifice of the self. (Nietzsche 1921: 121-122)

"Helmholtz listened to his boastings in a silence so gloomily disapproving that Bernard was offended." James Porter (2017) suggested that the explanation to phatic communion is to be found in Aristotelian goodwill (eunoia), but here we find support for pushing the indicator to the other extreme of the thymic scale.

The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of [|] another kind, an existence of another plane, - he is, in fact, the highest point of the wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane - it is with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, absorptions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemies of life, this denier - he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmatie forces of life. (Nietzsche 1921: 125-126)

Define:fetter - "a chain or manacle used to restrain a prisoner, typically placed around the ankles". Something more "harsh" and "hard" than the cement of society, the glue or lubricant of social interaction, even the more abstract fixative action of custom and tradition.

...And therefore good air! good air! and away, at any rate, from the neighbourhood of all the madhouses and hospitals of civilisation! And therefore Good company, our own company, or solitude, if it must be so! but anyway, at any rate, from the evil fumes of internal corruption [|] and the secret worm-eaten state of the sick! (Nietzsche 1921: 131-132)

Society is mad, I tell you! madly. Only good society is homogeneous society, I tell you! as an eccentric.

The ascetic priest must be accepted by us as the predestined saviour, herdsman, and champion of the sick herd: thereby do we first understand his awful historic mission. The lordship over sufferers is his kindgom, to that points his instinct, in that he finds his own special art, his master-skill, his kind of happiness. He must himself be sick, he must be kith and kin to the sick and the abortions so as to understand them, so as to arrive at an understanding with them; but he must also be strong, even more mastr of himself than of others, impregnable, forsooth, in his will for power, so as to acquire the trust and the awe of the weak, so that he can be their hold, bulwark, prop, compulsion, overseer, tyrant, god. (Nietzsche 1921: 132)

Now I wonder if the "ascetic priest" is not an oxymoron; how can one simultaneously be a recluse hermit and a religious leader of a community? Both ancient and modern cults could make this apparent enough, as does Prohvet Maltsvet to a degree, but this is something I'd like to read more about, should I ever reach the sociology of religion. The philosopher's ramblings, in other words, are not enough.

He will not be spared the waging of war with the beasts of prey, a war of guile (of "spirit") rather than of force, as is self-evident - he will in certain cases find it necessary to conjure up out of himself, or at any rate to represent practically a new type of the beast of prey - a new animal monstrosity in which the polar bear, the supple, cold, crouching panther, and, not least important, the fox, are joined together in a trinity as fascinating as it is fearsome. (Nietzsche 1921: 133)

Mis selle bändi nimi on? Polaarkaru, panter ja rebane. I am so far down the rabbit hole that the panther's swiftness, the polar bear's force, and the fox's cleverness immediately organize themselves into Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

He protects, in sooth, his sick herd well enough, does this strange herdsman; he protects them also against themselves, against the sparks (even in the centre of the herd) of wickedness, knavery, malice, and all the other ills that [|] the plaguey and the sick are heir to; he fights with cunning, hardness, and stealth against anarchy and against the ever imminent break-up inside the herd, where resentment, that most dangerous blasting-stuff and explosive, ever accumulates and accumulates. Getting rid of this blasting-stuff in sich a way that it does not blow up the herd and the herdsman, that is his real feat, his supreme utility if you wish to comprise in the shortest formula the value of the priestly life, it would be correct to say the priest is the diverter of the course of resentment. (Nietzsche 1921: 133-134)

Something tells me this is about constructing an external enemy to avoid internal ruptures. This is the stuff of fear-mongering.

In one case the object is to prevent being hurt any more; in the other case the object is to deaden a racking, insidious, nearly unbearable pain by a more violent emotion [|] of any kind whatsoever, and at any rate for the time being to drive it out of the consciousness - for this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild an emotion as possible, and to excite that emotion some excuse or other is needed. "It must be somebody's fault that I feel bad" - this kind of reasoning is peculiar to all invalids, and is but the more pronounced, the more ignorant they remain of the real cause of their feeling bad, the physiological cause (the cause may lie in a disease of the nervous sympathicus, or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a want of sulphate and phosphate of potash in the blood, or in pressure in the bowels which stops the circulation of the blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries, and so forth). (Nietzsche 1921: 134-135)

"When we are in an irascible mood we are disposed to get angry on the smallest pretext, and to find justifications for our anger on all sides. Our sensibility to anger is increased both in range and in delicacy. Things and persons seem contrary. We are ready to blame them and to exaggerate their defects." (Shand 1914: 151-152) - The difference lies in Shand describing the emotion, and Nietzsche the character defect as a physiological illness. Hyperbole, right?

Let me elaborate this hypothesis: I do not for a minute accept the very "pain in the soul" as a real fact, but only as an explanation (a casual explanation) of facts that could not hithero be precisely formulated; I regard it therefore as something as yet absolutely in thei air and devoid of scientific cogency - just a nice fat word in the place of a lean note of interrogation. (Nietzsche 1921: 137)

Phraseology.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some though morsels to swallow. (Nietzsche 1921: 137)

"The memory, however, the store of formulæ and traditions learned by heart, resider deeper, in the belly. A man will be said to have a good nanola, when he can acquire many formulæ, but though they enter through the larynx, naturally, as he learns them, repeating word for word, he has to stow them away in a bigger and more commodious receptacle; they sink down right to the bottom of his abdomen." (Malinowski 1922: 408-409)

But is he really a physician, this ascetic priest? We already understand why we are scarcely allowed to call him a physician, however much he likes to feel a "saviour" and let himself be worshipped as a saviour. (Nietzsche 1921: 138)

I have a nagging suspicion that he is speaking about something very specific to the ancient world, i.e. the very first jewish rabbis were essentially "therapeuds" (cf. therapeía, “service, medical treatment”). Foucault, perhaps, discussed it in his lectures).

Such a feeling of depression can have the most diverse origins; it may be the result of the crossing of too heterogeneous races (or of classes - genealogical and racial differences are also brought out in the classes: the European "Weltschmertz," the "Pessimism" of the nineteen century, is really the result of an absurd and sudden class-mixture); it may be brought about by a mistaken emigration - a race falling into a climate for which its power of adaptation is insufficient [...] (Nietzsche 1921: 139)

Let us recall who these days rage against desegregation and mudbloods. Though La Barre has his own well-merited accusations, it was Meltzer & Musolf (2003: 147) who proposed that Malinowski's statements on this topic were "classist".

Similarly it is improper to consider such a plan for starving the physical element and the desire, as in itself a symptom of insanity (as a clumsy species of roast-beef-eating "freethinkers" and Sir Christophers are fain to do); all the more certain is it that their method can and does pave the way to all kinds of mental disturbances, for instance, "inner lights" (as far as the cases of Hesychasts of Mount Athos), auditory and visual hallucinations, voluptuous ecstasies and effecvescences of sensualism (the history of St. Theresa). The explanation of such events given by the victims is always the acme of fanatical falsehood; this is self-evident. (Nietzsche 1921: 141)

How sensual is Durkheim's collective effervescence?

Note well, however, the tone of implicit gratitude that rings in the very will for an explanation of such a character. The supreme state, salvation itself, that final goal of universal hypnosis and peace, is always regarded by them as the mystery of mysteries, which even the most supreme symbols are inadequate to express; it is regarded as an entry and homecoming to the essence of things, as a liberation from all illusions, as "knowledge," as "truth," as "being," as an escape from every end, every wish, every action, as something even beyond Good and Evil. (Nietzsche 1921: 141b)

Here I have to agree with the notion that religious connotations blur the significance of "communion"; how, indeed, can we speak of communion without religious connotations?

"For those who know, there is no duty." "Redemption is not attained by the acquisition of virtues; for redemption consists in being one with Brahman, who is incapable of acquiring any perfection; and equally like does it consist in the giving up of faults, for the Brahman, unity with whom is what constitutes redemption, is eternally pure" (these passages are from the Commentaries of the Cankara, quoted from the first real European expert of the Indian philosophy, my friend Paul Deussen). (Nietzsche 1921: 142)

The really troubling thought is that the "spiritual" is the fourth in Fiordo's scheme. Where Malinowski places social union and Mukařovský beauty, so many place spirituality. If the first three constitute the mind (cf. Stout, Bourgh & Bain 1889-1890), the fourth appears in these cases to be the "outlet".

We wish, therefore, to pay honour to the idea of "redemption" in the great religions, but it is somewhat hard to remain serious in view of the appreciation meted out to the deep sleep by these exhausted passimists who are too tired even to dream - to the deep sleep considered, that is, as already a fusing into Brahman, as the attainment of the unio mystica with God. (Nietzsche 1921: 142)

"This is because we are dealing with a very complex notion, into which a multitude of badly analysed impressions enter, whose elaboration has been carried on for centuries, though men have had no clear consciousness of it" (Durkheim 1915: 241).

"When he has completely gone to sleep," say son this point the oldest and most venerable "script," "and come to perfect rest, so that [|] he sees no more any vision, oh dear one, is he united with Being, he has entered into his own self - encircled by the Self with its absolute knowledge, he has no more any consciousness of that which is without or of that which is within. Day and night cross not these bridges, nor age, nor death, nor suffering, nor good deeds, nor evil deeds." (Nietzsche 1921: 142-143)

Self and non-self; internal and external; familiar and strange; friend and foe, communization and differentiation.

The alleviation consists in the attention of the sufferer being absolutely diverted from suffering, in the incessant monopoly of the consciousness by action, so that consequently there is little room left for suffering - for narrow is it, this chamber of human consciousnesS! Mechanical activity and its corollaries, such as absolute regularity, punctilious unreasoning obedience, the chronic routine of life, the complete occupation of time, a certain liberty to be impersonal, nay, a training in "impersonality," self-forgetfulness, "incuria sui" - with what thoroughness and expert subtlety have all these methods been exploited by the ascetic priest in his war with pain! (Nietzsche 1921: 144)

Manual work shuts off the default mode network? See. "Thought Bubbles" in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - are your bad thoughths more swole and hit the gym more often than you do?.

When he has to tackle sufferers of the lower orders, slaves, or prisoners (or women, who for the most part are a compound of labour-slave and prisoner), all he has to do is to juggle a little with the names, and to rechristen, so as to make them see henceforth a benefit, a comparative happiness, in objects which they hated - the slave's discontent with his lot was at any rate not invented by the priests. (Nietzsche 1921: 144)

Oh boy. This book really has not aged well.

An investigation of the origin of Christianity in the Roman world shows that co-operative unions for poverty, sickness, and burial sprang up in the lowest stratum of contemporary society, amid which the chief antidote against depression, the little joy experienced in mutual benefits, was deliberately fostered. Perchance this was then a novelty, a real discovery? This conjuring up of the will for cooperation, for family organisation, for communal life, for "Cænacula," necessarily brought the Will for Power, which had been already infinitesimally stimulated, to a new and much fuller manifestation. The herd organisation is a genuine advance and triumph in the fight with depression. With the growth of the community there matures even to individuals a new interest, which often enough takes him out of the more personal element in his discontent, his aversion to himself, the "despectus sui" of Geulincx. All sick and diseased people strive [|] instinctively after a herd-organisation, out of a desire to shake off their sense of oppressive discomfort and weakness; the ascetic priest divines this instinct and promotes it; wherever a herd exists it is the instinct of weakness which has wished for the herd, and the cleverness of the priests which has organised it, for, mark this: by an equally natural necessity the strong strive as much for isolation as the weak for union: when the former bind themselves it is only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of the Will for Power, much against the wishes of the individual conscience; the latter, on the contrary, range themselves together with positive delight in such a muster - their instincts are as much gratified thereby as the instincts of the "born master" (that is, the solitary beast-of-prey species of man) are disturbed and wounded to the quick by organisation. (Nietzsche 1921: 145-146)

Another interpretation of communion. Caenaculum (attic, garret) is an upstairs dining room, the top/upper story; perhaps the "European drawing-room"? This passage provides an alternative simultaneously to taciturnity (discomfort) and the purposes of establish social communion - what's more, in relation to pugnacity!

The methods employed by the ascetic priest, which we have already learnt to know - stifling of all vitality, mechanical energy, the little joy, and especially the method of "love your neighbour" herd-organisation, the awaking of the communal consciousness of power, to such a pitch [|] that the individual's disgust with himself becomes eclipsed by his delight in the thriving of the community - these are, according to modern standards, the "innocent" methods employed in the fight with depression; let us turn now to the more interesting topic of the "guilty" methods. (Nietzsche 1921: 146-147)

My questions receive answers; I didn't think this book would go that much into the herd instinct. It is not surprising to see it in relation with the Will to Power. What is somewhat surprising is the clarity of this relation after the fact. For Trotter might have thought this all too self-evident.

For, do not deceive yourself: what constitutes the chief characteristic of modern souls and of modern books is not the lying, but the innocence which is part and parcel of their intellectual dishonesty. The inevitable running up against this "innocence" everything constitutes the most distasteful feature of the somewhat dangerous business which a modern psychologist has to undertake: it is a [|] part of our great danger - it is a road which perhaps leads us straight to the great nausea - I know quite well the purpose which all modern books will and can serve (granted that they last, which I am not afraid of, and granted equally that there is to be at some future day a generation with a more rigid, more severe, and healthier taste) - the function which all modernity generally will serve with posterity: that of an emetic, - and this by reason of its moral sugariness and falsity, its ingrained feminism, which it is pleased to call "Idealism," and at any rate believes to be idealism. Our cultured men of to-day, our "good" men, do not lie - that is true; but it does not redound to their honour! (Nietzsche 1921: 147-148)

Listening to anti-feminist youtube commentary circa 2016, and finding out Nietzsche's "hard" understanding of health. "All modern books" is an especially silly generalization. I'm willing to bet that there's a generous share of such conspiratorial thinking in the late 19th century. The consternation is a typical symptom of the downfall-ist outlook shared by Camille Paglia and many right-wing Psittacidae.

But you will soon understand me. - Putting it shortly, there is reason enough, is there not, for us psychologists [|] nowadays never to get away from a certain mistrust of our own selves? Probably even we ourselves are still "too good" for our work; probably, whatever contempt we feel for this popular craze for morality, we ourselves are perhaps none the less its victims, prey, and slaves; probably it infects even us. (Nietzsche 1921: 149-150)

Does the dentist worry about and treat her teeth? Mõtleja ametihaigused. Parallelism with the opening sentence of the book.

The ascetic ideal in the service of projected emotional excess: - he who remembers the previous essay will already partially anticipate the essential meaning compressed into these above ten words. The thorough unswitching of the human soul, the plunging of it into terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as to free it, as through some lightning shock, from all the smalness and pettiness of unhappiness, depression, and discomfort: what ways lead to this goal? (Nietzsche 1921: 150)

If you recall what he has written about freedom for the philosopher (ante, 108-109) and the context of his discussing his pragmatic theory in relation with lightning (ante, 27-28), you may realise that the subtext here is about producing at atmosphere of "terror, frost, ardour, rapture", so as to unify a community through "liberation" from other small and petty things in favour of the goals of the larger community. Not pretty. This one does not bring joy.

And which of these ways does so most safely? ...At bottom all great emotions have this power, provided that they find a sudden outlet - emotions such as rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in sooth, the ascetic priest has had no scruples in taking into his service the whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel, unleashing now these and now those, with the same constant object of waking man out of his protracted melancholy, of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his dull pain ,his shrinking misery, but always under the sanction [|] of a religious interpretation and justification. (Nietzsche 1921: 150-151)

In other words, the herd leader may arouse strong negative, aggressive, and violent passions, emotions, and sentiments because his conscience does not bar him from doing so. He is not against turning humans into wolves, watching intently for any sign of enmity, for the discernible hint of a growl.

The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul - was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of "guilt." I was already indicated in the previous essay the origin of this feeling - as a piece of animal psychology and nothing else: we were thus confronted with the feeling of "guilt," in its crude state, as it were. IT was first in the hands of the priest, real artist that he was in the feeling of guilt, that it took shape - oh, what a shape! (Nietzsche 1921: 151)

One of those occasions on which he sounds nearly reasonable. Guilt, one cannot not notice, is a regular player in this type of moral philosophy. Pity might be closely related, and altruism and tender sympathies creep in.

[...] everywhere mute pain, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the spasms of an unknown happiness, the shriek for "redemption." In point of fact, thanks to this system of procedure, the old depression, dullness, and fatigue were absolutely conquered, life itself became very interesting again, awake, eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, burnt away, exhausted and yet not tired - such was the figure cut by man, "the sinner," who was initiated into these mysteries. This grand old wizard of an ascetic priest fighting with depression - he had clearly triumphed, his kingdom had come: men no longer grumbled at pain, men panted after pain: "More pain! More pain!" (Nietzsche 1921: 153)

Extreme hyperbole but no matter. What I dislike about the Firthian-Laverian emphasis on ritual in communion is that it makes social interaction to much into a mystery to be initiated into with knowing the correct greeting and verbal routines. It is pragmatic, but not to its favour.

At any rate, some understanding should be come to as to the expression "be of use." If you only wish to express that such a system of treatment has reformed man, I do not gainsay it: I merely add that "reformed" conveys to my mind much as "tamed," "weakened," "discouraged," "refined," "daintified," "emasculated" (and thus it means almost as much as injured). (Nietzsche 1921: 154)

More on the domestication of human beings. Society makes man sick, depressed, and oppressed creatures, eh? This I hope to find out when I turn to Le Bon and McDougall's Group Mind (1920), to seek for an explanation of Malinowski's preference for differentiation and reversion to communization. There is definitely something aristocratic about it.

Similarly ask history. In every body politic where the ascetic priest has established this treatment of the sick, disease has on every occasion spread with sinister speed throughout its length and breadth. What was always the "result"? A shattered nervous system, in addition to the existing malady, and this in the greatest as in the smallest, in the individuals as in masses. We find, in consequence of the penance and redemption-training, awful epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to history, such as the St. Vitus and St. John dances of the [|] Middle Ages; we find, as another phase of its aftereffect, frightful mutilations and chronic depressions, by means of which the temperament of a nation or a city (Geneva, Bâle) is turned once for all into its opposite; - this training, again, is responsible for the witch-hysteria, a phenomenon analogous to somnambulism (eight great epidemic outbursts of this only between 1564 and 1605); - we find similarly in its train those delirious deathcravings of large masses, whose awful "shriek," "evviva la morte!" was heard over the whole of Europe, now interrupted by voluptuous variations and anon by a rage for destruction, just as the same emotional sequence with the same intermittencies and sudden changes is now universally observed in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin scores once more a great success (religious neurosis appears as a manifestation of the devil, there is no doubt of it. What is it? Quæritur). (Nietzsche 1921: 154-155)

A key juncture where national characteristics and national atmosphere intersect. The keyword, in truth, is political atmosphere, or what we today would call some city or nation's geopolitical situation. Isn't that new pop-psychological invention, the Trump Derangement Syndrome, a manifestation of "emotional excess"?

The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted taste in artibus et litteris - he corrupts it still. (Nietzsche 1921: 156)

Soul searching or just looking for fights? Keel ja kirjandus.

In the very midst of the Græco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face to face with an ancient world of writings which had not yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were still to be read, to possess which we would give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at that time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they rae generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: "We too have our classical literature, wo do not need that of the Greeks" - and meanwhile they proudly pointed to their books of legends, their letters of apostles, and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that to-day the English "Salvation Army" wages its fight against Shakespeare and other "heathens" with an analogous literature. (Nietzsche 1921: 156)

There is an easy and natural connection between simplicity (even, primitiveness) and vanity (egocentric, unreflexive). On the whole, is this the typical pessimism of literary criticism? Aren't they all crying about the quality of new books when everyone can see that both amount and quality of writing has increased and improved. It's not news if the dog bites man (nor, in the U.S., when the police kill 10,000 dogs a year).

You already guess it, I do not like the "New Testament"; it almost upset me that I stand so isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this over-valued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is [|] against me; but what boots it! "Here I stand! I cannot help myself" - I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament - yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incompatible naïveté of tho strong heart; further still, I find a people. In the New, on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness which appertains to the epoch (and the Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic. (Nietzsche 1921: 156-157)

I mean, his nose is not wrong, the New Testament is first and foremost the allegorical religious literature of a Hellenized jewish sect, even more confusingly extolling the virtues and miracles of a Syriac speaking jew from a watchtower settlement. Christianity is wack, no doubt about it. But why be 14 and so deep about it?

Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly every one lacked good breeding. How dare any one make so much fuss about their little failings as do these pious little fellows! No one cares a straw about it - let alone God. (Nietzsche 1921: 157)

Nothing but a clever turn of a phrase, at best an additional seductive fascination, some lingual instinct in a groggy bag of bones.

Luther's opposition to the mediæval saints of the Church (in particular, against "that devil's hog, the Pope"), was, there is no doubt, at bottom the opposition of a boor, who was offended at the good etiquette of the Church, that worship-etiquette of the sacredotal code, which only admits to the holy of holies the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door against the boors. (Nietzsche 1921: 158)

Something along the lines of "moral codes", language as "a more tedious, code", and morality law as "an arbitrary extra-natural code" in Trotter (114-115; 119-120; and 123-123).

The ascetic ideal, you will guess, was at no time and in no place, a school of good taste, still less of good manners - at the best it was a school for sacredotal mannerS: that is, it contains in itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good [|] manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure it is itself a "non plus ultra." (Nietzsche 1921: 158-159)

"Rarely is a writer so impressed by one of these laws that he is moved to collect the evidence in its favour, as was Montaigne in respect of the law that difficulty gives all things their value" (Shand 1914: 73). This "measured" manner, I thought for a moment, has something to do with self-control, self-denial, self-discipline - as well as with the more obvious aspect of being "civilized" or "cultured" to abstention and delay - even, distance.

The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it repudiates, denies, affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and [|] was there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does it believe in its own precedence over every power - it believes that nothing powerful exists in the world that has not first got to receive from "it" a meaning, a right to exist, a vaule, as being an instrument in its work, a way and means to its end, to one end. (Nietzsche 1921: 159-160)

Reads like a description of totalizing systems in cultural semiotics, i.e. defines everything contrary to its interests as either meaningless or its mortal enemy.

Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends - their very mastery in their handiwork - how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a self-atæsthetic: do you know that? (Nietzsche 1921: 161)

I do not know that, but I do like the image. Parimad õpetlased põletavad oma ajuküünlaid mõlemast otsast korraga.

We "knowers" have grown by degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of proving what is beliveed, the conclusion of its actual improbability. We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": for that very reason we do deny that gaith proves anything, - a strong faith, which produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability of - illusion. (Nietzsche 1921: 162)

Fallibilism and certitude. Ratiocinating statistics.

If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirit; for they still believe in truth. (Nietzsche 1921: 163)

Post-truth. (Continued shortly on p. 166.)

Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former - add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening [|] of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that more unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life). (Nietzsche 1921: 167-168)

Is that what science really achieves? "Well, Terry Εagleton encourages us to let Marxism breathe in our new century by allowing for things which Κarl Marx, frankly, had no opinion on, by letting the guidelines of the Great Dialectic, or the Grand Narrative, guide us towards moral and not moralist thinking." - Trotsky, probably.

Has, perchance, man grown less in control of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? (Nietzsche 1921: 169)

Lexical equivalents for non-consecutiveness, informality, and triviality.

Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane - he rolls faster and faster away from the centre - whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"? - Well! this would be the straight way - to the old ideal? (Nietzsche 1921: 169)

Trippy. Vt. ka mäenõlvakult välja hüütud laviin. "'Well!' the young man said.

It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game - they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck! - he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. (Nietzsche 1921: 170)

Looks like a candidate for Malinowski's objections (doth protesteth much too much) to collective mind, the supra-individual organism, body politick, etc.

You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze, - an eye that looks out as an isolated North Pole explorer looks out perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?) - there is snow - here is life silenced, the last crows which we saw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada" - here is nothing more flourishes and grows, at the most the meta-politics of St. Petersburg and the "pity" of Tolstoi. (Nietzsche 1921: 171)

"Metapolitics"? In Carol Diethe's translation: "You see a sad, hard but determined gaze, - an eye peers out, like a lone explorer at the North Pole (perhaps so as not to peer in? or peer back? [...]). Here there is snow, here life is silenced; the last crows heard here are called 'what for?', 'in vain', 'nada' - here nothing flourishes or grows any more, except, perhaps, for St Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoi's 'compassion'."

This Nature, who gave to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ' οδόντων, for what purpose did Nature give me my foot? - To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely to run away! (Nietzsche 1921: 172)

With no context, this is possibly one of the best sentences I've ever read.

The invariable success of every kind intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything," and finally the paralysis agitans of "modern ideas". (Nietzsche 1921: 173)

A self-hating German! Otherwise, national feeling meets vanity. Manifest destiny? The special destiny of Russia?

Europe nowadays is, above all, wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement; it appears has no more crying necessity than stimulantia and alcohol. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. (Nietzsche 1921: 173)

Complementary to "countersign of thought". Europe is decadent, we get it.

All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery" even in the essence of life - ever is the law-giver finally exposed to the cry, "patere legem quam ipse tulisti"; in thus wise did Christianity go to ruin as a dogma, through its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a morality - we are standing on the threshold of this event. (Nietzsche 1921: 176)

Too absolutist. Has life gone to ruin? Or will it go to ruin by reason of itself? Our sun will dim and make life for our species intolerable, but there is also no certitude in Earth being the only harbinger of life in the universe (we may be accidents of cosmic dust). The threshold was the moral interregnum of the 19th century.

And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friend (for as yet I know of no friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness as a problem? (Nietzsche 1921: 176)

Virtual addressees - instead of an actual circle of society as an immediate audience he is addressing the circle of society in futuro as the emerging mediated audience; he is projecting other minds interested in the same problem. The anticipative (as opposed to the mnemonic or concurrent) type of autocommunication. What is actually anticipated by Nietzsche, is surprisingly slow - Europe will go to pieces in two centuries. No Eesti 200.

If you except the ascetic ideal, the animal man [|] has no meaning. His existence on earth contained no end; "What is the purpose of man at all?" was a question without answer; the will for man and the world was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a rerain a still greater "Vanity!" The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something was lacking, that a tremendous void encircled man - he did not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he suffered from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was in the main a diseased animal; but his problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "To what purpose do we suffer?" (Nietzsche 1921: 176-177)

A dive into the deep end. Our being tired of man, of man's sickness, as he would put it, amounts to an existential dread of the meaninglessness of life. This "vanity" is alternatively formulated as The Selfish Gene. It would help to dive deeper for the etymology and uses of "vanity". Likewise with affirmation (phatikos?), which levels up from yes-men to saying "yes" to life. There is only one really serious philosophical problem, eh?

[...] but in spite of all that - man was saved thereby, he had a meaning, and from henceforth was no more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of change, of nonsense, he could now "will" something - absolutely immaterial [|] to what end, to what purpos, with what means he wished: the will itself was saved. (Nietzsche 1921: 177-178)

Juhuse sulgpall.

The Europeans now imagine themselves as representing, in the main, the highest types of men on earth. (Nietzsche 1921: 179)

Blunt Description Trauma.

I rate Michael Angelo higher than Raphael, because, through all the Christian clouds and prejudices of his time, he saw the ideal of a culture nobler than the Christo-Raphaelian: whilst Raphael truly and modestly glorified only the values handed down to him, and did not carry within himself any inquiry, yearning instincts. (Nietzsche 1921: 180)

Perhaps indicative of what he means by "the pathos of nobility and distance" beyond the blue-eyed aryan barbarians. His views of history are still obscure because they appear so ahistorical, more mythical than anything.

Michael Angelo, on the other hand, saw and felt the problem of the law-giver of new values: the problem of the conqueror made perfect, who first had to subdue the "hero within himself," the man exalted to his highest pedestal, master even of his pity, who mercilessly shatters and annihilates everything that does not bear his own stamp, shining in Olympian divinity. (Nietzsche 1921: 180)

From what can be seen throughout the book, mastering one's pity is a prime candidate for the subtraction of symmetry from sympathy. The hard-hearted are spurious and one-sided in their expressions of sympathy, i.e. pity and condolences, because they deny themselves active sympathy with the other, the stranger, the not-self.

The problem of truthfulness is quite a new one. I am astonished. From this standpoint we regard such natures as Bismarck as culpable out of careness, such as Richard Wagner out of want of modesty; we would condemn Plato for his pia fraus, Kant for the derivation of his Categorical Imperative, his own belief certainly not having come to him from this source. Finally, even doubt turns against itself: doubt in doubt. And the question as to the value of truthfulness and its extent lies there. (Nietzsche 1921: 181)

Since I have nothing to do with truth, nothing but cursory interest in it, and don't operate with truthfulness as much as chance and certitude, I cannot even begin to verify how old Truth as a philosophical problem is. That it is not so new as is suggested by its opposite, doubt, which has been a problem since Descartes, at the very least. In any case, "doubting doubt" is an apt descriptor of reading about Peirce and Clay on this issue; the nagging feeling is that out modern "new problem" with post-truthfulness is not so new after all but a well-trodden philosophical path of unknown age.

The real German Mephistopheles crosses the Alps, and believes that everything there belongs to him. Then he recovers himself, like Winkelmann, like Mozart. He looks upon Faust and Hamlet as caricatures, invented to be laughed at, and upon Luther also. Goethe had his good German moments, when he laughed inwardly at all these things. But then he fell back again into his cloudy moods. (Nietzsche 1921: 182)

Все наше! There is something terrorizing on shudders to when one takes in the map of Nazi Germany at its height circa 1943. This brooding, hard-hearted and herd-minded disciplinarian would have reigned over so many different peoples. It is a short step from there to look at a map of the world coloured blue and red after preference for Fortnite and PUBG, and realize that it's a near straight line dividing the East and West, with the red herring dick of Sahel penetrating the other side (by u/xmansiphone).

The Germans are a dangerous people: they are experts at inventing intoxicants. Gothic, rococo (according to Semper), the historical sense and exoticism, Hegel, Richard [|] Wagner - Leibniz, too (dangerous at the present day) - (they even idealised the serving soul as the virtue of scholars and soldiers, also as the simple mind). The Germans may well be the most composite people on earth. (Nietzsche 1921: 182-183)

The German's national characteristic of cloudy moods "is not a reassuring factor, but, on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous" (PC 4.1). Leibniz's New essays concerning human understanding is only 900 pages of thick scribble (tihe kribu-krabu).

The smallness and baseness of the German soul were not and are not consequences of the system of small states; for it is well known that the inhabitants of much smaller states were proud and independent: and it is not a large state per se that makes souls freer and more manly. The man whose soul obeys the slavish command: "Thou shalt and must kneel!" in whose body there is an involuntary bowing and scraping to titles, orders, gracious glances from above - well, such a man in an "Empire" will only bow all the more deeply and lick the dust more fervently in the presence of the great sovereign than in the presence of the lesser: this cannot be doubted. (Nietzsche 1921: 183)

"Rahva suuruse määrab ära tema unistuste suurus" - Lennart Meri, Anu Lambi suu läbi // Also, see "toading" and the over-emphasized lack of social hierarchy in Malinowski's phatic communion, as opposed to Barton's treatment of salutations.

Van Dyck was nobler in this respect: who in all those whom he painted added a certain amount of what he himself most highly valued: he did not descend from himself, but rather lifted up others to himself when he "rendered." (Nietzsche 1921: 184)

A flair of insight on annotation, fair use, and originality; for meta-blogging.

We could at any time have counted on the fingers of one hand those German learned men who possessed wit. the remainder have understanding, and a few of them, happily, that famous "childlike character" which divines. [.|.] As Frenchmen reflect the politeness and esprit of French society, so do Germans reflect something of the deep, pensive earnestness of their mystics and musicians, and also of their silly childishness. The Italian exhibits a great deal of republican distinction and art, and can show himself to be noble and proud without vanity. (Nietzsche 1921: 184-185)

I expect to find out about these reflections in due time, beginning with Tarde and Le Bon. The description of German character here calls to mind Malinowski as an Austrian subject, with his mystical ties to the other white colonial powers and remembered by the natives later as "the singer", known to have sung Wagner when out and about. As to nobleness and proudness without vanity, see the art of conversation (Mahaffy 1887).

A larger number of the higher and better-endowed men will, I hope, have in the end so much self-restraint as to be able to get rid of their bad taste for affection and sentimental darkness, and so turn against Richard Wagner as much as against Schopenhauer. These two Germans are leading us to ruin; they flatted our dangerous qualities. A stronger future is prepared for us in Goethe, Beethoven, and Bismarck than in these racial aberrations. We have had no philosophers yet. (Nietzsche 1921: 185)

Demonstrating my superficiality, I am not interested if there is a specific technical term in rhetoric, sociology, or communication studies for pandering to future generations. Sounds like something that could interest literary theorists employing Jakobsonian addressivity to draw out signs of influence (or, to take a recent political illustration, for Trump to hint to Russia to get Hillary's e-mails and to reframe it as "joking" after the fact when it hits the fan). Also, what is malicious tenderness?

The peasant is the commonest type of noblesse, for he is dependent upon himself most of all. Peasant blood is still the best blood in Germany - for example, Luther, Niebuhr, Bismarck. (Nietzsche 1921: 185)

Salt of the earth! Figes' A People's Tragedy and Huxley's Island have made me realise that Winston taking exception to the proles and writing "If there is hope, it lies in the proles" had much to do with the inner turbulence of Russian revolution, as that was perhaps the most significant difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was that Lenin thought it possible to skip the road of industrialism, capitalism, and open market towards communism, and Trotsky's minority thought it necessary to aid aid and educate the peasantry into a middle class first. In other words, expediency was preferred to devastating results, as comrade Ulyanov realized when dictating his will through the wall, only to have it locked up, too, until the long overdue revolutionary experiment fell down with the crumbling of another wall.

That the manliest men shall rule: this is only the natural order of things. (Nietzsche 1921: 186)

Writes a respected naturalist, apparently in all seriousness.

The future of German culture rests with the sons of the Prussian officers. (Nietzsche 1921: 186)

"Eesti kultuuri tulevik sõltub Saksa juhi järglastest" - Riigikogu liige, kes visatakse Zavoodist välja, tõenäoliselt.

Ruling, and helping the highest thoughts to victory - the only things that can make me interested in Germany. England's small-mindedness is the great danger now on earth. I observe more inclination towards greatness in the feelings of the Russian Nihilists than in those of the English Utilitarians. We require an intergrowth of the German and Slav races, and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, for us to become masters of the world. (Nietzsche 1921: 187)

Why is greatness still so loaded? Make Russian Nihilists Great Again? It is odd to see so little change in almost 150 years.

A giving-up of the English principle of the people's right of representation. We require the representation of the great interests. (Nietzsche 1921: 187)

Hey! Corporations are people too!

We require an unconditional union with Russia, together with a mutual plan of action which shall not permit any English schemata to obtain mastery in Russia. No American future! (Nietzsche 1921: 188)

A Molotov-Ribbentrop Union.

A national system of politics is untenable, and embarrassment by Christian views is a very great evil. In Europe all sensible people are sceptics, whether they say so or not. [...] I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with - for I see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly - is the United Europe. (Nietzsche 1921: 188)

Much conservative self-contradictions. A national system is untenable and international unions of small nations not to be preferred over an unconditional union with another empire, while in the same breath bemoaning new empires! It is amazing how the sensible European sceptics become Euro-sceptics. A United Europe? But... but... we are not like the French! Pweas no steppy.

But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe - I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires" - will in a short time become [|] economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world with good prespects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to an understanding" with England. (Nietzsche 1921: 188-189)

My inner conspiracy theorist was bouncing up and down with joy at the Atlantean attitude towards international diplomacy.

The English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new rôle of broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. (Nietzsche 1921: 189)

Having recently rewatched Muriel's Wedding, what I see here is the Scramble for Africa play out. Germany needs South-Africa and New Holland for its territories.

Nation - men who speak one language and read the same newspapers. These men now call themselves "nations," and would far too readily trace their descent from the same source and through the same history; which, however, even with the assistance of the most malignant lying in the past, they have not succeeded in doing. (Nietzsche 1921: 190)

An invaluable definition for tying together gossip, curiosity, and the herd instinct with national characteristics, political unity, and communion of knowledge.

What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if it is possible, in the modern European hotch-potch, to raise questions of "race"! (It being premised that the origin of such writers is not in Horneo and Borneo.) [...] Maxim: To associate with no man who takes any part in the mendacious race swindle. (Nietzsche 1921: 190)

Not sure if good advice or four-dimensional chess race baiting.

With the freedom of travel now existing, groups of men of the same kindred can join together and establish communal habits and customs. The overcoming of "nations." [...] To make Europe a centre of culture, national stupidities [|] should not make us blind to the fact that in the higher regions there is already a continuous reciprocal dependence. France and German philosophy. Richard Wagner and Paris (1830-50). Goethe and Greece. All things are impelled towards a synthesis of the European past in the highest types of mind. (Nietzsche 1921: 190-191)

Group (or community, even a small circle of society) can create novelty and form new traditions, all due to the new means of communication and transportation. Technology and culture.

This is our distrust, which recurs again and again; our care, which never lets us sleep; our question, which no one listens to or wishes to listen to; our Sphinx, near which there is more than one precipice: we believe that the men of present-day Europe are deceived in regard to the things which we love best, and a pitiless demon (no, not pitiless, only indifferent and puerile) - plays with our hearts and their enthusiasm, as it may perhaps have already played with everything that lived and loved; I believe that everything which we Europeans of to-day are in the habit of admiring as the values of all these respected things called "humanity," "mankind," "sympathy," "pity," may be of some value as the debilitation and moderating of certain powerful and dangerous primitive impulses. Nevertheless, in the long run all these things are nothing else than the [|] belittlement of the entire type "man," his mediocrisation, if in such a desperate situation I may make use of such a desperate expression. (Nietzsche 1921: 191-192)

The pathos of nobility and distance find themselves duped by the Will to Power embodied in tender feelings given to charity, oneness with other human-like "creatures", feeling what they feel, feeling pity for them. It is recognizing the modification of impulses brought about by the social instinct, which the oh-so-despised utilitarians connected with the origins of altruism and society. These instincts are powerful and dangerous. Is that not Malinowski's point? With the bedside knowledge of Shand's ethnographic psychology, Malinowski (PC 3.2-3) related "Many instincts and innate trends", to "the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other's company", including "fear", "pugnacity", "ambition", "vanity", "passion for power and wealth", and possibly more (McDougall also relates the sex instinct and "flirting"). For belittlement, see my rants about PC being a slur and sympathia malevolens generally.

I think that the commedia umana for an epicurean spectator-god must consist in this: that the Europeans, by virtue of their growing morality, believe in all their innocence and vanity that they are rising higher and higher, whereas the truth is that they are sinking lower and lower - i.e., through the cultivation of all the virtues which are useful to a herd, and through the repression of the other and contrary virtues which give rise to a new, higher, stronger, masterful race of men - the first-named virtues merely develop the herd-animal in man and stabilitate the animal "man," for until now man has been "the animal as yet unstabilitated." (Nietzsche 1921: 192)

Lets we forget that Nietzsche is also an embodiment of edgy theories in the philosophy of culture. See domestication and "taming", all the rants on ascetic priests as the herdsman.

For this is the danger of to-day: everything that we loved when we were young has betrayed us. Our last love - the love which makes us acknowledge her, our love for Truth - let us take care that she, too, does not betray us! (Nietzsche 1921: 193)

After seeing the recent adaptation of Truth and Justice in a crowded cinema, this passage is reminiscent of Andres's inner pain and his intoxication from scripture. It is his love for Truth that stokes his resentful bouts of Justice.

On the following pages will be found the complete list of titles in "The Modern Library," including those published during the Fall of Nineten Hundred and Twenty-one. New titles are added in the Spring and Fall of every year.

I found The poems of Ernest Dowson (1906) but not Maxim Gorky's Creatures That Once Were Men and Four Other Stories with Introduction by G. V? Chesterton. The Internet Archive is full of books about Nietzsche but not by Nietzche; not even Thus Spake Zarathrustra with Introduction by Frau Foester-Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil with Introduction by W. H. Wright. On the other hand, A Contemporary Nietzsche Reader (online resourche) has not yet entered On the Genealogy of Morals. Hey, I wonder what's going on during the Fall of Two Thousand and Twenty-one?