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Nietzsche - v02 - Early Greek Philosophy
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Title: The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete
and authorized English translation, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Author: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
Publisher: [Edinburgh and London : T. N. Foulis, 1909-1913. ]
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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
First Complete and Authorised English Translation
in Eighteen Volumes
EDITED BY
Dr OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME TWO
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
## p. (#12) #################################################
Of the First Edition of
Oite'. Thousand Five Hundred
'; '" Copies this is
no 324
\
## p. (#13) #################################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
EARLY GREEK
PHILOSOPHY &
OTHER ESSAYS
TRANSLATED BY
MAXIMILIAN A. MUGGE
AUTHOR OF "FR. NIETZSCHE, HIS LIFE AND WORK," ETC-
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON &> EDINBURGH
191 I
## p. (#14) #################################################
'- - 1 . 1 -
\ r
printed at
The Darien Pres
Edinburgh
## p. (#15) #################################################
CONTENTS
PAGE
Translator's Preface - - - vii
i. The Greek State—Preface to an unwritten
book (1871) . . . . 1
2. The Greek Woman—Fragment (1871) - 19
3. On Music and Words—Fragment (1871) - 27
4. Homer's Contest—Preface to an unwritten
book (1872) - - - - 49
5. The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture—Preface to
an unwritten book (1872) - - 63
6. Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the
Greeks (1873) - - - 71
7. On Truth and Falsity in their ultramoral
SENSE (1873) . . . - 171
## p. (#16) #################################################
## p. (#17) #################################################
m
## p. (#18) #################################################
## p. i (#19) ###############################################
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
First Complete and Authorised English Translation
in Eighteen Volumes
EDITED BY
Dr OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME TWO
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
## p. ii (#20) ##############################################
Of the First Edition of
Oiie: Thousand Five Hundred
Copies this is
no 324
## p. iii (#21) #############################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
EARLY GREEK
PHILOSOPHY &
OTHER ESSAYS
TRANSLATED BY
MAXIMILIAN A. MUGGE
AUTHOR OF "FR. NIETZSCHE, HIS LIFE AND WORK," ETC.
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON & EDINBURGH
1911
## p. iv (#22) ##############################################
Printed at
The Daribn Pres
Edinburgh
## p. v (#23) ###############################################
CONTENTS
PAGE
Translator's Preface - - - vii
i. The Greek State—Preface to an unwritten
book (1871) 1
2. The Greek Woman—Fragment (1871) - 19
3. On Music and Words—Fragment (1871) - 27
4. Homer's Contest—Preface to an unwritten
book (1872) - - - - 49
5. The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture—Preface to
an unwritten book (1872) - - - 63
6. Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the
Greeks (1873) - - - 71
7. On Truth and Falsity in their ultramoral
sense (1873) - - - - 171
## p. vi (#24) ##############################################
i
## p. vii (#25) #############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The essays contained in this volume treat of various
subjects. With the exception of perhaps one we
must consider all these papers as fragments. Written
during the early Seventies, and intended mostly as
prefaces, they are extremely interesting, since traces
of Nietzsche's later tenets—like Slave and Master
morality, the Superman—can be found everywhere.
But they are also very valuable on account of the
young philosopher's daring and able handling of
difficult and abstruse subjects. "Truth and Falsity,"
and "The Greek Woman" are probably the two
essays which will prove most attractive to the aver-
age reader.
In the essay on The Greek State the two tenets
mentioned above are clearly discernible, though the
Superman still goes by the Schopenhauerian label
"genius. " Our philosopher attacks the modern
ideas of the "dignity of man" and of the " dignity
of labour," because Existence seems to be without
worth and dignity. The preponderance of such
illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays
vested in the "slaves. " The Greeks saw no dignity
in labour. They saw the necessity of it, and the
necessity of slavery, but felt ashamed of both. Not
even the labour of the artist did they admire,
although they praised his completed work.
## p. viii (#26) ############################################
VU1 TRANSLATORS PREFACE
If the Greeks perished through their slavery, one
thing is still more certain: we shall perish through
the lack of slavery. To the essence of Culture
slavery is innate. It is part of it. A vast multitude
must labour and "slave" in order that a few may
lead an existence devoted to beauty and art.
Strife and war are necessary for the welfare of
the State. War consecrates and purifies the State.
The purpose of the military State is the creating
of the military genius, the ruthless conqueror, the
War-lord. There also exists a mysterious connec-
tion between the State in general and the creating
of the genius.
In The Greek Woman, Nietzsche, the man who
said, "One cannot think highly enough of women,"
delineates his ideal of woman. Penelope, Antigone,
Electra are his ideal types.
Plato's dictum that in the perfect State the
family would cease to exist, belongs to the most
intimate things uttered about the relation between
women and the State. The Greek woman as mother
had to vegetate in obscurity, to lead a kind of Cran-
fordian existence for the greater welfare of the body
politic. Only in Greek antiquity did woman occupy
her proper position, and for this reason she was
more honoured than she has ever been since. Pythia
was the mouthpiece, the symbol of Greek unity.
On MUSIC and Words. Music is older, more
fundamental than language. Music is an expres-
sion of cosmic consciousness. Language is only a
gesture-symbolism.
It is true the music of every people was at first
allied to lyric poetry; "absolute music" always
## p. ix (#27) ##############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ix
appeared much later. But that is due to the double
nature in the essence of language. The tone of
the speaker expresses the basic pleasure- and dis-
pleasure-sensations of the individual. These form
the tonal subsoil common to all languages; they
are comprehensible everywhere. Language itself
is a super-structure on that subsoil; it is a gesture-
symbolism for all the other conceptions which man
adds to that subsoil.
The endeavour to illustrate a poem by music is
futile. The text of an opera is therefore quite
negligible. Modern opera in its music is therefore
often only a stimulant or a remembrancer for set,
stereotyped feelings. Great music, i. e. , Dionysean
music, makes us forget to listen to the words.
Homer's Contest. The Greek genius acknow-
ledged strife, struggle, contest to be necessary in
this life. Only through competition and emulation
will the Common-Wealth thrive. Yet there was no
unbridled ambition. Everyone's individual endea-
vours were subordinated to the welfare of the com-
munity. The curse of present-day contest is that it
does not do the same.
In The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture an amusing and
yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be
culture of the German Philistines who after the
Franco-Prussian war were swollen with self-conceit,
self-sufficiency, and were a great danger to real Cul-
ture. Nietzsche points out Schopenhauer's great
philosophy as the only possible means of escaping
the humdrum of Philistia with its hypocrisy and
intellectual ostrichisation.
o
## p. x (#28) ###############################################
X translator's preface
The essay on GREEK PHILOSOPHY DURING THE
Tragic Age is a performance of great interest to
the scholar. It brims with ideas. The Hegelian
School, especially Zeller, has shown what an im-
portant place is held by the earlier thinkers in the
history of Greek thought and how necessary a
knowledge of their work is for all who wish to
understand Plato and Aristotle. Diels' great book:
"Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker", Benris, Bur-
net's and Fairbanks' books we may regard as the
peristyle through which we enter the temple of Early
Greek Philosophy. Nietzsche's essay then is like
a beautiful festoon swinging between the columns
erected by Diels and the others out of the marble
of facts.
Beauty and the personal equation are the two
"leitmotive" of Nietzsche's history of the pre-So-
cratian philosophers. Especially does he lay stress
upon the personal equation, since that is the only
permanent item of interest, considering that every
"System " crumbles into nothing with the appear-
ance of a new thinker. In this way Nietzsche
treats of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmeni-
des,Xenophanes, Anaxagoras. There are also some
sketches of a draft for an intended but never accom-
plished continuation, in which Empedocles, Demo-
critus and Plato were to be dealt with.
Probably the most popular of the Essays in this
book will prove to be the one on Truth and
Falsity. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the
relativity of truth, on "Appearance and Reality,"
on " perceptual flux " versus—" conceptual conceit. "
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for
## p. xi (#29) ##############################################
TRANSLATORS PREFACE XI
existence, a means taking the place of the animal's
horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to de-
ception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative
and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed
by convention and utility are set down as truth.
The liar does not use these standard coins of the
realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no,
but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X " of a
thing, but indicate only external characteristics.
Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the
cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorph-
isms about which one has forgotten that they are
such. There are different truths to different beings.
Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and
ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of
error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When
the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie
to him without hurting him he—loves them! —
The text underlying this translation is that of
Vol. I. of the "Taschenausgabe. " One or two
obscure passages I hope my conjectures may have
elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate
the year when these essays were written.
In no other work have I felt so deeply the great
need of the science of Signifies with its ultimate
international standardisation of terms, as attempted
by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have
succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning
of the author in spite of a certain looseness in his
philosophical terminology.
## p. xii (#30) #############################################
Xll TRANSLATORS PREFACE
The English language is somewhat at a dis-
advantage through its lack of a Noun-Infinitive.
I can best illustrate this by a passage from Par-
menides:
\pT) to \iy(iv T( votlv T ibv Ififuvac «m yap uvai,
pufiiv 8* ovk (OTiv to <r iyto <f>pd£to&ai avorya.
In his usual masterly manner Diels translates
these lines with: "Das Sagen und Denken musz
ein Seiendes sein. Denn das Sein existiert, das
Nichts existiert nicht; das heisz ich dich wohl zu
beherzigen. " On the other hand in Fairbanks'
"version" we read: "It is necessary both to say
and to think that being is; for it is possible that
being is, and it is impossible that not being is;
this is what I bid thee ponder. " In order to
avoid a similar obscurity, throughout the paper on
"Early Greek Philosophy" I have rendered
"das Seiende" (to ibv) with "Existent", "das
Nicht-Seiende " with " Non-Existent"; "das Sein"
(thai) with "Being" and "das Nicht-Sein" with
"Not-Being. "
I am directly or indirectly indebted for many
suggestions to several friends of mine, especially to
two of my colleagues, J. Charlton Hipkins, M. A. ,
and R. Miller, B. A. , for their patient revision of
the whole of the proofs.
M. A. MUGGE.
London, July 1911.
## p.
"
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for
## p. xi (#29) ##############################################
TRANSLATORS PREFACE XI
existence, a means taking the place of the animal's
horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to de-
ception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative
and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed
by convention and utility are set down as truth.
The liar does not use these standard coins of the
realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no,
but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X " of a
thing, but indicate only external characteristics.
Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the
cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorph-
isms about which one has forgotten that they are
such. There are different truths to different beings.
Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and
ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of
error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When
the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie
to him without hurting him he—loves them! —
The text underlying this translation is that of
Vol. I. of the "Taschenausgabe. " One or two
obscure passages I hope my conjectures may have
elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate
the year when these essays were written.
In no other work have I felt so deeply the great
need of the science of Signifies with its ultimate
international standardisation of terms, as attempted
by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have
succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning
of the author in spite of a certain looseness in his
philosophical terminology.
## p. xii (#30) #############################################
Xll TRANSLATORS PREFACE
The English language is somewhat at a dis-
advantage through its lack of a Noun-Infinitive.
I can best illustrate this by a passage from Par-
menides:
\pT) to \iy(iv T( votlv T ibv Ififuvac «m yap uvai,
pufiiv 8* ovk (OTiv to <r iyto <f>pd£to&ai avorya.
In his usual masterly manner Diels translates
these lines with: "Das Sagen und Denken musz
ein Seiendes sein. Denn das Sein existiert, das
Nichts existiert nicht; das heisz ich dich wohl zu
beherzigen. " On the other hand in Fairbanks'
"version" we read: "It is necessary both to say
and to think that being is; for it is possible that
being is, and it is impossible that not being is;
this is what I bid thee ponder. " In order to
avoid a similar obscurity, throughout the paper on
"Early Greek Philosophy" I have rendered
"das Seiende" (to ibv) with "Existent", "das
Nicht-Seiende " with " Non-Existent"; "das Sein"
(thai) with "Being" and "das Nicht-Sein" with
"Not-Being. "
I am directly or indirectly indebted for many
suggestions to several friends of mine, especially to
two of my colleagues, J. Charlton Hipkins, M. A. ,
and R. Miller, B. A. , for their patient revision of
the whole of the proofs.
M. A. MUGGE.
London, July 1911.
## p. 1 (#31) ###############################################
The Greek State
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1871)
## p. 2 (#32) ###############################################
## p. 3 (#33) ###############################################
We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks
in two ideas, which are given as it were as a com-
pensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly
and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the
word " slave " : we talk of the "dignity of man " and
of the " dignity of labour. " Everybody worries in
order miserably to perpetuate a miserable exist-
ence; this awful need compels him to consuming
labour; man (or, more exactly, the human intellect)
seduced by the " Will" now occasionally marvels at
labour as something dignified. However in order
that labour might have a claim on titles of honour,
it would be necessary above all, that Existence itself,
to which labour after all is only a painful means,
should have more dignity and value than it appears
to have had, up to the present, to serious philo-
sophies and religions. What else may we find in the
labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to
exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse
by which stunted plants stretch their roots through
earthless rocks!
Out of this awful struggle for existence only
individuals can emerge, and they are at once
occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture,
lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which
Nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern
world, which, compared with the Greek, usually pro-
## p. 4 (#34) ###############################################
4 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
duces only abnormalities and centaurs, in which
the individual, like that fabulous creature in the
beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled
together out of pieces, here in the modern world in
one and the same man the greed of the struggle
for existence and the need for art show themselves
at the same time: out of this unnatural amalgama-
tion has originated the dilemma, to excuse and to
consecrate that first greed before this need for art.
Therefore we believe in the " Dignity of man " and
the " Dignity of labour. "
The Greeks did not require such conceptual
hallucinations, for among them the idea that labour
is a disgrace is expressed with startling frankness;
and another piece of wisdom, more hidden and less
articulate, but everywhere alive, added that the
human thing also was an ignominious and piteous
nothing and the "dream of a shadow. " Labour is
a disgrace, because existence has no value in itself;
but even though this very existence in the alluring
embellishment of artistic illusions shines forth and
really seems to have a value in itself, then that pro-
position is still valid that labour is a disgrace—a
disgrace indeed by the fact that it is impossible for
man, fighting for the continuance of bare exist-
ence, to become an artist. In modern times it is
not the art-needing man but the slave who deter-
mines the general conceptions, the slave who
according to his nature must give deceptive names
to all conditions in order to be able to live. Such
phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of
labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding
itself from itself. Woful time, in which the slave
"N
## p. 5 (#35) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 5
requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to
think about and beyond himself! Cursed seducers,
who have destroyed the slave's state of innocence
by the fruit of the tree of knowledge! Now the
slave must vainly scrape through from one day to
another with transparent lies recognisable to every
one of deeper insight, such as the alleged "equal
rights of all" or the so-called " fundamental rights
of man," of man as such, or the "dignity of labour. "
Indeed he is not to understand at what stage and
at what height dignity can first be mentioned—
namely, at the point, where the individual goes
wholly beyond himself and no longer has to work
and to produce in order to preserve his individual
existence.
And even on this height of " labour" the Greek
at times is overcome by a feeling, that looks like
shame. In one place Plutarch with earlier Greek
instinct says that no nobly born youth on beholding
the Zeus in Pisa would have the desire to become
himself a Phidias, or on seeing the Hera in Argos,
to become himself a Polyklet; and just as little would
he wish to be Anacreon, Philetas or Archilochus,
however much he might revel in their poetry. To
the Greek the work of the artist falls just as much
under the undignified conception of labour as any
ignoble craft. But if the compelling force of the
artistic impulse operates in him, then he must pro-
duce and submit himself to that need of labour.
And as a father admires the beauty and the gift of
his child but thinks of the act of procreation with
shamefaced dislike, so it was with the Greek. The
joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded
## p. 6 (#36) ###############################################
6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
him as to its origin which appeared to him, like all
"Becoming" in nature, to be a powerful necessity,
a forcing of itself into existence. That feeling by
which the process of procreation is considered as
something shamefacedly to be hidden, although by
it man serves a higher purpose than his individual
preservation, the same feeling veiled also the origin
of the great works of art, in spite of the fact that
through them a higher form of existence is inaugu-
rated, just as through that other act comes a new
generation. The feeling of skame seems therefore
to occur where man is merely a tool of manifesta-
tions of will infinitely greater than he is permitted
to consider himself in the isolated shape of the
individual.
Now we have the general idea to which are to be
subordinated the feelings which the Greek had with
regard to labour and slavery. Both were considered
by them as a necessary disgrace, of which one feels
ashamed, as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same
time. In this feeling of shame is hidden the uncon-
scious discernment that the real aim needs those
conditional factors, but that in that need lies the
fearful and beast-of-prey-like quality of the Sphinx
Nature, who in the glorification of the artistically
free culture-life so beautifully stretches forth her
virgin-body. Culture, which is chiefly a real need
for art, rests upon a terrible basis: the latter how-
ever makes itself known in the twilight sensation of
shame. In order that there may be a broad, deep,
and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enor-
mous majority must, in the service of a minority,
be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater
## p. 7 (#37) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 7
degree than their own wants necessitate. At their
cost, through the surplus of their labour, that
privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle
for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a
new world of want.
Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding
truth, that slavery is of the essence of Culture; a truth
of course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute
value of Existence. This truth is the vulture, that
gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of
Culture. The misery of toiling men must still in-
crease in order to make the production of the world
of art possible to a small number of Olympian men.
Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath
nourished by Communists and Socialists of all times,
and also by their feebler descendants, the white race
of the " Liberals," not only against the arts, but also
against classical antiquity. If Culture really rested
upon the will of a people, if here inexorable powers
did not rule, powers which are law and barrier to the
individual, then the contempt for Culture, the glori-
fication of a "poorness in spirit," the iconoclastic
annihilation of artistic claims would be more than an
insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-
like individuals; it would be the cry of compassion
tearing down the walls of Culture; the desire for
justice, for the equalization of suffering, would
swamp all other ideas. In fact here and there some-
times an exuberant degree of compassion has for a
short time opened all theflood gates of Culture-life ; a
rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared
with the first radiant rise of Christianity and under
it was born Christianity's most, beautiful fruit, the
## p. 8 (#38) ###############################################
8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
gospel according to St John. But there are also
instances to show that powerful religions for long
periods petrify a given degree of Culture, and cut
off with inexorable sickle everything that still grows
on strongly and luxuriantly. For it is not to be for-
gotten that the same cruelty, which we found in the
essence of every Culture, lies also in the essence
of every powerful religion and in general in the
essence of power, which is always evil; so that we
shall understand it just as well, when a Culture is
shattering, with a cry for liberty or at least justice,
a too highly piled bulwark of religious claims. That
which in this "sorry scheme" of things will live
(i. e. , must live), is at the bottom of its nature a reflex
of the primal-pain and primal-contradiction, and
must therefore strike our eyes—" an organ fashioned
for this world and earth"—as an insatiable greed
for existence and an eternal self-contradiction, within
the form of time, therefore as Becoming. Every
moment devours the preceding one, every birth is
the death of innumerable beings; begetting, living,
murdering, all is one. Therefore we may compare
this grand Culture with a blood-stained victor, who
in his triumphal procession carries the defeated along
as slaves chained to his chariot, slaves whom a bene-
ficent power has so blinded that, almost crushed
by the wheels of the chariot, they nevertheless still
exclaim: "Dignity of labour! " " Dignity of Man! "
The voluptuous Cleopatra-Culture throws ever again
the most priceless pearls, the tears of compassion for
the misery of slaves, into her golden goblet. Out of
the emasculation of modern man has been born the
enormous social distress of the present time, not out
## p. 9 (#39) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 9
of the true and deep commiseration for that misery;
and if it should be true that the Greeks perished
through their slavedom then another fact is much
more certain, that we shall perish through the lack
of slavery. Slavedom did not appear in any way
objectionable, much less abominable, either to early
Christianity or to the Germanic race. What an
uplifting effect on us has the contemplation of the
mediaeval bondman, with his legal and moral rela-
tions,—relations that were inwardly strong and
tender,—towards the man of higher rank, with the
profound fencing-in of his narrow existence—how
uplifting! —and how reproachful!
He who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs
in Society without melancholy, who has learnt to
conceive of it as the continual painful birth of those
privileged Culture-men, in whose service everything
else must be devoured—he will no longer be de-
ceived by that false glamour, which the moderns
have spread over the origin and meaning of the
State. For what can the State mean to us, if not
the means by which that social-process described
just now is to be fused and to be guaranteed in its
unimpeded continuance? Be the sociable instinct
in individual man as strong as it may, it is only the
iron clamp of the State that constrains the large
masses upon one another in such a fashion that a
chemical decomposition of Society, with its pyra-
mid-like superstructure, is bound to take place.
Whence however originates this sudden power of
the State, whose aim lies much beyond the insight
and beyond the egoism of the individual? How
did the slave, the blind mole of Culture, originate?
## p. 10 (#40) ##############################################
IO VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
The Greeks in their instinct relating to the law of
nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct, which
even in the ripest fulness of their civilisation and
humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen
mouth such words as: "to the victor belongs the
vanquished, with wife and child, life and property.
Power gives thefirst right,axi& there is no right, which
at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence. "
Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility
Nature, in order to arrive at Society, forges for her-
self the cruel tool of the State—namely, that con-
queror with the iron hand, who is nothing else than
the objectivation of the instinct indicated. By the
indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors
the spectator feels, that they are only the means of
an intention manifesting itself through them and
yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces
attach themselves to them with such mysterious
speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in
the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under
the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity
hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic
will were emanating from them.
Now when we see how little the vanquished
trouble themselves after a short time about the
horrible origin of the State, so that history informs
us of no class of events worse than the origins of
those sudden, violent, bloody and, at least in one
point, inexplicable usurpations: when hearts invol-
untarily go out towards the magic of the growing
State with the presentiment of an invisible deep
purpose, where the calculating intellect is enabled to
see an addition of forces only; when now the State
## p. 11 (#41) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE II
is even contemplated with fervour as the goal and
ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the indi-
vidual: then out of all that speaks the enormous
necessity of the State, without which Nature might
not succeed in coming, through Society, to her de-
liverance in semblance, in the mirror of the genius.
What discernments does the instinctive pleasure in
the State not overcome! One would indeed feel
inclined to think that a man who looks into the
origin of the State will henceforth seek his salva-
tion at an awful distance from it; and where can
one not see the monuments of its origin—devastated
lands, destroyed cities, brutalised men, devouring
hatred of nations! The State, of ignominiously low
birth, for the majority of men a continually flowing
source of hardship, at frequently recurring periods
the consuming torch of mankind—and yet a word,
at which we forget ourselves, a battle cry, which has
filled men with enthusiasm for innumerable really
heroic deeds, perhaps the highest and most venerable
object for the blind and egoistic multitude which
only in the tremendous moments of State-life has
the strange expression of greatness on its face!
We have, however, to consider the Greeks, with
regard to the unique sun-height of their art, as the
"political men in themselves," and certainly history
knows of no second instance of such an awful un-
chaining of the political passion, such an uncondi-
tional immolation of all other interests in the service
of this State-instinct; at the best one might dis-
tinguish the men of the Renascence in Italy with a
similar title for like reasons and by way of com-
parison. So overloaded is that passion among the
## p. 12 (#42) ##############################################
12 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself
and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This
bloody jealousy of city against city, of party against
party, this murderous greed of those little wars,
the tiger-like triumph over the corpse of the slain
enemy, in short, the incessant renewal of those
Trojan scenes of struggle and horror, in the spec-
tacle of which, as a genuine Hellene, Homer stands
before us absorbed with delight—whither does this
naive barbarism of the Greek State point? What
is its excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice?
Proud and calm, the State steps before this tribunal
and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming
womanhood: Greek society. For this Helena the
State waged those wars—and what grey-bearded
judge could here condemn? —
Under this mysterious connection, which we here
divine between State and art, political greed and
artistic creation, battlefield and work of art, we
understand by the State, as already remarked, only
the cramp-iron, which compels the Social process;
whereas without the State, in the natural bellum om-
nium contra omnes Society cannot strike root at all
on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family.
Now, after States have been established almost
everywhere, that bent of the bellum omnium contra
omnes concentrates itself from time to time into a
terrible gathering of war-clouds and discharges itself
as it were in rare but so much the more violent
shocks and lightning flashes. But in consequence
of the effect of that bellum,—an effect which is turned
inwards and compressed,—Society is given time
during the intervals to germinate and burst into leaf,
## p. 13 (#43) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE I3
in order, as soon as warmer days come, to let the
shining blossoms of genius sprout forth.
In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I
will not hide those phenomena of the present in
which I believe I discern dangerous atrophies of the
political sphere equally critical for art and society.
If thereshould exist men,who as itwerethrough birth
are placed outside the national- and State-instincts,
who consequently have to esteem the State only in so
far as they conceive that it coincides with their own
interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as
the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed col-
lateral existence of great political communities pos-
sible, in which they might be permitted to pursue their
own purposes without restriction. With this idea in
their heads they will promote that policy which will
offer the greatest security to these purposes; whereas
it is unthinkable, that they, against their intentions,
guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct, should
sacrifice themselves for the State-tendency, unthink-
able because they lack that very instinct. All other
citizens of the State are in the dark about what
Nature intends with her State-instinct within them,
and they follow blindly; only those who stand
outside this instinct know what they want from the
State and what the State is to grant them. There-
fore it is almost unavoidable that such men
should gain great influence in the State because
they are allowed to consider it as a means, whereas
all the others under the sway of those unconscious
purposes of the State are themselves only means
for the fulfilment of the State-purpose. In order
now to attain, through the medium of the State,
## p. 14 (#44) ##############################################
14 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the highest furtherance of their selfish aims, it is
above all necessary, that the State be wholly freed
from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so
that it may be used rationally; and thereby they
strive with all their might for a condition of things
in which war is an impossibility. For that purpose
the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the
political separatisms and factions and through the
establishment of large equipoised State-bodies and
the mutual safeguarding of them to make the suc-
cessful result of an aggressive war and consequently
war itself the greatest improbability; as on the other
hand they will endeavour to wrest the question of
war and peace from the decision of individual lords,
in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism
of the masses or their representatives; for which
purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the
monarchic instincts of the nations. This purpose
they attain best through the most general promul-
gation of the liberal optimistic view of the world,
which has its roots in the doctrines of French
Rationalism and the French Revolution, i. e. , in a
wholly un-Germanic, genuinely neo-Latin shallow
and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help
seeing in the prevailing international movements
of the present day, and the simultaneous promulga-
tion of universal suffrage, the effects of the fear
of war above everything else, yea I behold behind
these movements, those truly international home-
less money-hermits, as the really alarmed, who,
with their natural lack of the State-instinct, have
learnt to abuse politics as a means of the Exchange,
and State and Society as an apparatus for their own
## p. 15 (#45) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE IS
enrichment. Against the deviation of the State-
tendency into a money-tendency, to be feared from
this side, the only remedy is war and once again
war, in the emotions of which this at least becomes
obvious, that the State is not founded upon the fear
of the war-demon, as a protective institution for
egoistic individuals, but in love to fatherland and
prince, it produces an ethical impulse, indicative of
a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as
a dangerous and characteristic sign of the present
political situation the application of revolutionary
thought in the service of a selfish State-less
money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive
of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism
as the result of modern financial affairs fallen
into strange hands, and if I imagine all evils
of social conditions together with the necessary
decay of the arts to have either germinated from
that root or grown together with it, one will have
to pardon my occasionally chanting a Psean on war.
Horribly clangs its silvery bow; and although it
comes along like the night, war is nevertheless
Apollo, the true divinity for consecrating and puri-
fying the State. First of all, however, as is said in
the beginning of the "Iliad," he lets fly his arrow
on the mules and dogs. Then he strikes the men
themselves, and everywhere pyres break into flames.
Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a
necessity for the State as the slave is for society,
and who can avoid this verdict if he honestly asks
himself about the causes of the never-equalled Greek
art-perfection?
He who contemplates war and its uniformed pos-
## p. 16 (#46) ##############################################
16 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
sibility, the soldier's profession, with respect to the
hitherto described nature of the State, must arrive
at the conviction, that through war and in the pro-
fession of arms is placed before our eyes an image,
or even perhaps the prototype of the State. Here we
see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an
immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic
mass into military castes, out of which rises, pyramid-
shaped, on an exceedingly broad base of slaves the
edifice of the "martial society. " The unconscious
purpose of the whole movement constrains every in-
dividual under its yoke, and produces also in hetero-
geneous natures as it were a chemical transformation
of their qualities until they are brought into affinity
with that purpose. In the highest castes one per-
ceives already a little more of what in this internal
process is involved at the bottom, namely the crea-
tion of the military genius—with whom we have
become acquainted as the original founder of states.
In the case of many States, as, for example, in the
Lycurgian constitution of Sparta, one can distinctly
perceive the impress of that fundamental idea of the
State, that of the creation of the military genius. If
we now imagine the military primal State in its
greatest activity, at its proper " labour," and if we
fix our glance upon the whole technique of war,
we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked up
from everywhere, as to the "dignity of man" and
the "dignity of labour" by the question, whether
the idea of dignity is applicable also to that labour,
which has as its purpose the destruction of the
"dignified" man, as well as to the man who is
entrusted with that "dignified labour," or whether
## p. 17 (#47) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE 17
in this warlike task of the State those mutually
contradictory ideas do not neutralise one another. I
should like to think the warlike man to be a means
of the military genius and his labour again only
a tool in the hands of that same genius; and not
to him, as absolute man and non-genius, but to him
as a means of the genius—whose pleasure also can
be to choose his tool's destruction as a mere pawn
sacrificed on the strategist's chessboard—is due a
degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have
been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius.
But what is shown here in a single instance is valid
in the most general sense; every human being, with
his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is
a tool of the genius, consciously or unconsciously;
from this we may immediately deduce the ethical
conclusion, that "man in himself," the absolute man
possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties;
only as a wholly determined being serving uncon-
scious purposes can man excuse his existence.
Plato's perfect State is according to these con-
siderations certainly something still greater than
even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe,
not to mention the smiling mien of superiority with
which our "historically" educated refuse such a
fruit of antiquity. The proper aim of the State,
the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procrea-
tion and preparation of the genius,—compared with
which all other things are only tools, expedients
and factors towards realisation—is here discovered
with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness.
Plato saw through the awfully devastated Herma
of the then-existing State-life and perceived even
## p. 18 (#48) ##############################################
I8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
then something divine in its interior. He believed
that one might be able to take out this divine image
and that the grim and barbarically distorted out-
side and shell did not belong to the essence of the
State: the whole fervour and sublimity of his politi-
cal passion threw itself upon this belief, upon that
desire—and in the flames of this fire he perished.
That in his perfect State he did not place at the
head the genius in its general meaning, but only
the genius of wisdom and of knowledge, that he
altogether excluded the inspired artist from his
State, that was a rigid consequence of the Socratian
judgment on art, which Plato, struggling against
himself, had made his own. This more external,
almost incidental gap must not prevent our recog-
nising in the total conception of the Platonic State
the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a profound and
eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the
connection between State and Genius. What we be-
lieved we could divine of this cryptograph we have
said in this preface.
N
## p. 19 (#49) ##############################################
The Greek Woman
(Fragment, 1871)
## p. 20 (#50) ##############################################
## p. 21 (#51) ##############################################
Just as Plato from disguises and obscurities brought
^to light the innermost purpose of the State, so also
he conceived the chief cause of the position of the
Hellenic Woman with regard to the State; in both
cases he saw in what existed around him the image
of the ideas manifested to him, and of these ideas
of course the actual was only a hazy picture and
phantasmagoria. He who according to the usual
custom considers the position of the Hellenic Woman
to be altogether unworthy and repugnant to human-
ity, must also turn with this reproach against the
Platonic conception of this position; for, as it were,
the existing forms were only precisely set forth in
this latter conception. Here therefore our question
repeats itself: should not the nature and the position
of the Hellenic Woman have a necessary relation to
the goals of the Hellenic Will?
Of course there is one side of the Platonic con-
ception of woman, which stands in abrupt contrast
with Hellenic custom: Plato gives to woman a full
share in the rights, knowledge and duties of man,
and considers woman only as the weaker sex, in
that she will not achieve remarkable success in all
things, without however disputing this sex's title to
all those things. We must not attach more value to
this strange notion than to the expulsion of the artist
out of the ideal State; these are side-lines daringly
## p. 22 (#52) ##############################################
22 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
mis-drawn, aberrations as it were of the hand other-
wise so sure and of the so calmly contemplating
eye which at times under the influence of the de-
ceased master becomes dim and dejected; in this
mood he exaggerates the master's paradoxes and
in the abundance of his love gives himself satisfac-
tion by very eccentrically intensifying the latter's
doctrines even to foolhardiness.
The most significant word however that Plato as
a Greek could say on the relation of woman to the
State, was that so objectionable demand, that in the
perfect State, the Family was to cease. At present let
us take no account of his abolishing even marriage,
in order to carry out this demand fully, and of his
substituting solemn nuptials arranged by order of
the State, between the bravest men and the noblest
women, for the attainment of beautiful offspring.
In that principal proposition however he has in-
dicated most distinctly—indeed too distinctly, offen-
sively distinctly—an important preparatory step of
the Hellenic Will towards the procreation of the
genius. But in the customs of the Hellenic people
the claim of the family on man and child was
extremely limited: the man lived in the State, the
child grew up for the State and was guided by the
hand of the State. The Greek Will took care that
the need of culture could not be satisfied in the
seclusion of a small circle. From the State the
individual has to receive everything in order to
return everything to the State. Woman accord-
ingly means to the State, what sleep does to man.
In her nature lies the healing power, which replaces
that which has been used up, the beneficial rest in
## p. 23 (#53) ##############################################
THE GREEK WOMAN 23
which everything immoderate confines itself, the
eternal Same, by which the excessive and the surplus
regulate themselves. In her the future generation
dreams. Woman is more closely related to Nature
than man and in all her essentials she remains ever
herself. Culture is with her always something ex-
ternal, a something which does not touch the kernel
that is eternally faithful to Nature, therefore the
culture of woman might well appear to the Athenian
as something indifferent, yea—if one only wanted to
conjure it up in one's mind, as something ridiculous.
He who at once feels himself compelled from that
to infer the position of women among the Greeks as
unworthy and all too cruel, should not indeed take
as his criterion the " culture " of modern woman and
her claims, against which it is sufficient just to point
out the Olympian women together with Penelope,
Antigone, Elektra. Of course it is true that these
are ideal figures, but who would be able to create
such ideals out of the present world ? —Further in-
deed is to be considered what sons these women
have borne, and what women they must have been
to have given birth to such sons! The Hellenic
woman as viother had to live in obscurity, because
the political instinct together with its highest aim
demanded it. She had to vegetate like a plant, in
the narrow circle, as a symbol of the Epicurean
wisdom Aa0e /ftwo-as. Again, in more recent times,
with the complete disintegration of the principle of
the State, she had to step in as helper; the family
as a makeshift for the State is her work; and in this
sense the artistic aim of the State had to abase
itself to the level of a domestic art. Thereby it has
## p. 24 (#54) ##############################################
24 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
been brought about, that the passion of love, as the
one realm wholly accessible to women, regulates our
art to the very core. Similarly, home-education
considers itself so to speak as the only natural one
and suffers State-education only as a questionable
infringement upon the right of home-education: all
this is right as far as the modern State only is
concerned. —With that the nature of woman withal
remains unaltered, but her power is, according to
the position which the State takes up with regard
to women, a different one. Women have indeed
really the power to make good to a certain extent
the deficiencies of the State—ever faithful to their
nature, which I have compared to sleep. In Greek
antiquity they held that position, which the most
supreme will of the State assigned to them: for
that reason they have been glorified as never since.
The goddesses of Greek mythology are their images:
the Pythia and the Sibyl, as well as the Socratic
Diotima are the priestesses out of whom divine
wisdom speaks. Now one understands why the
proud resignation of the Spartan woman at the
news of her son's death in battle can be no fable.
Woman in relation to the State felt herself in her
proper position, therefore she had more dignity than
woman has ever had since. Plato who through
abolishing family and marriage still intensifies the
position of woman, feels now so much reverence
towards them, that oddly enough he is misled by a
subsequent statement of their equality with man, to
abolish again the order of rank which is their due:
the highest triumph of the woman of antiquity, to
have seduced even the wisest!
## p. 25 (#55) ##############################################
THE GREEK WOMAN 2$
As long as the State is still in an embryonic con-
dition woman as mother preponderates and deter-
mines the grade and the manifestations of Culture:
in the same way as woman is destined to comple-
ment the disorganised State.
Find more books at https://www. hathitrust. org.
Title: The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete
and authorized English translation, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Author: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900.
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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
First Complete and Authorised English Translation
in Eighteen Volumes
EDITED BY
Dr OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME TWO
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
## p. (#12) #################################################
Of the First Edition of
Oite'. Thousand Five Hundred
'; '" Copies this is
no 324
\
## p. (#13) #################################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
EARLY GREEK
PHILOSOPHY &
OTHER ESSAYS
TRANSLATED BY
MAXIMILIAN A. MUGGE
AUTHOR OF "FR. NIETZSCHE, HIS LIFE AND WORK," ETC-
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON &> EDINBURGH
191 I
## p. (#14) #################################################
'- - 1 . 1 -
\ r
printed at
The Darien Pres
Edinburgh
## p. (#15) #################################################
CONTENTS
PAGE
Translator's Preface - - - vii
i. The Greek State—Preface to an unwritten
book (1871) . . . . 1
2. The Greek Woman—Fragment (1871) - 19
3. On Music and Words—Fragment (1871) - 27
4. Homer's Contest—Preface to an unwritten
book (1872) - - - - 49
5. The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture—Preface to
an unwritten book (1872) - - 63
6. Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the
Greeks (1873) - - - 71
7. On Truth and Falsity in their ultramoral
SENSE (1873) . . . - 171
## p. (#16) #################################################
## p. (#17) #################################################
m
## p. (#18) #################################################
## p. i (#19) ###############################################
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
First Complete and Authorised English Translation
in Eighteen Volumes
EDITED BY
Dr OSCAR LEVY
VOLUME TWO
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY
## p. ii (#20) ##############################################
Of the First Edition of
Oiie: Thousand Five Hundred
Copies this is
no 324
## p. iii (#21) #############################################
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
EARLY GREEK
PHILOSOPHY &
OTHER ESSAYS
TRANSLATED BY
MAXIMILIAN A. MUGGE
AUTHOR OF "FR. NIETZSCHE, HIS LIFE AND WORK," ETC.
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON & EDINBURGH
1911
## p. iv (#22) ##############################################
Printed at
The Daribn Pres
Edinburgh
## p. v (#23) ###############################################
CONTENTS
PAGE
Translator's Preface - - - vii
i. The Greek State—Preface to an unwritten
book (1871) 1
2. The Greek Woman—Fragment (1871) - 19
3. On Music and Words—Fragment (1871) - 27
4. Homer's Contest—Preface to an unwritten
book (1872) - - - - 49
5. The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture—Preface to
an unwritten book (1872) - - - 63
6. Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the
Greeks (1873) - - - 71
7. On Truth and Falsity in their ultramoral
sense (1873) - - - - 171
## p. vi (#24) ##############################################
i
## p. vii (#25) #############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The essays contained in this volume treat of various
subjects. With the exception of perhaps one we
must consider all these papers as fragments. Written
during the early Seventies, and intended mostly as
prefaces, they are extremely interesting, since traces
of Nietzsche's later tenets—like Slave and Master
morality, the Superman—can be found everywhere.
But they are also very valuable on account of the
young philosopher's daring and able handling of
difficult and abstruse subjects. "Truth and Falsity,"
and "The Greek Woman" are probably the two
essays which will prove most attractive to the aver-
age reader.
In the essay on The Greek State the two tenets
mentioned above are clearly discernible, though the
Superman still goes by the Schopenhauerian label
"genius. " Our philosopher attacks the modern
ideas of the "dignity of man" and of the " dignity
of labour," because Existence seems to be without
worth and dignity. The preponderance of such
illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays
vested in the "slaves. " The Greeks saw no dignity
in labour. They saw the necessity of it, and the
necessity of slavery, but felt ashamed of both. Not
even the labour of the artist did they admire,
although they praised his completed work.
## p. viii (#26) ############################################
VU1 TRANSLATORS PREFACE
If the Greeks perished through their slavery, one
thing is still more certain: we shall perish through
the lack of slavery. To the essence of Culture
slavery is innate. It is part of it. A vast multitude
must labour and "slave" in order that a few may
lead an existence devoted to beauty and art.
Strife and war are necessary for the welfare of
the State. War consecrates and purifies the State.
The purpose of the military State is the creating
of the military genius, the ruthless conqueror, the
War-lord. There also exists a mysterious connec-
tion between the State in general and the creating
of the genius.
In The Greek Woman, Nietzsche, the man who
said, "One cannot think highly enough of women,"
delineates his ideal of woman. Penelope, Antigone,
Electra are his ideal types.
Plato's dictum that in the perfect State the
family would cease to exist, belongs to the most
intimate things uttered about the relation between
women and the State. The Greek woman as mother
had to vegetate in obscurity, to lead a kind of Cran-
fordian existence for the greater welfare of the body
politic. Only in Greek antiquity did woman occupy
her proper position, and for this reason she was
more honoured than she has ever been since. Pythia
was the mouthpiece, the symbol of Greek unity.
On MUSIC and Words. Music is older, more
fundamental than language. Music is an expres-
sion of cosmic consciousness. Language is only a
gesture-symbolism.
It is true the music of every people was at first
allied to lyric poetry; "absolute music" always
## p. ix (#27) ##############################################
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ix
appeared much later. But that is due to the double
nature in the essence of language. The tone of
the speaker expresses the basic pleasure- and dis-
pleasure-sensations of the individual. These form
the tonal subsoil common to all languages; they
are comprehensible everywhere. Language itself
is a super-structure on that subsoil; it is a gesture-
symbolism for all the other conceptions which man
adds to that subsoil.
The endeavour to illustrate a poem by music is
futile. The text of an opera is therefore quite
negligible. Modern opera in its music is therefore
often only a stimulant or a remembrancer for set,
stereotyped feelings. Great music, i. e. , Dionysean
music, makes us forget to listen to the words.
Homer's Contest. The Greek genius acknow-
ledged strife, struggle, contest to be necessary in
this life. Only through competition and emulation
will the Common-Wealth thrive. Yet there was no
unbridled ambition. Everyone's individual endea-
vours were subordinated to the welfare of the com-
munity. The curse of present-day contest is that it
does not do the same.
In The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philo-
sophy to a German Culture an amusing and
yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be
culture of the German Philistines who after the
Franco-Prussian war were swollen with self-conceit,
self-sufficiency, and were a great danger to real Cul-
ture. Nietzsche points out Schopenhauer's great
philosophy as the only possible means of escaping
the humdrum of Philistia with its hypocrisy and
intellectual ostrichisation.
o
## p. x (#28) ###############################################
X translator's preface
The essay on GREEK PHILOSOPHY DURING THE
Tragic Age is a performance of great interest to
the scholar. It brims with ideas. The Hegelian
School, especially Zeller, has shown what an im-
portant place is held by the earlier thinkers in the
history of Greek thought and how necessary a
knowledge of their work is for all who wish to
understand Plato and Aristotle. Diels' great book:
"Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker", Benris, Bur-
net's and Fairbanks' books we may regard as the
peristyle through which we enter the temple of Early
Greek Philosophy. Nietzsche's essay then is like
a beautiful festoon swinging between the columns
erected by Diels and the others out of the marble
of facts.
Beauty and the personal equation are the two
"leitmotive" of Nietzsche's history of the pre-So-
cratian philosophers. Especially does he lay stress
upon the personal equation, since that is the only
permanent item of interest, considering that every
"System " crumbles into nothing with the appear-
ance of a new thinker. In this way Nietzsche
treats of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmeni-
des,Xenophanes, Anaxagoras. There are also some
sketches of a draft for an intended but never accom-
plished continuation, in which Empedocles, Demo-
critus and Plato were to be dealt with.
Probably the most popular of the Essays in this
book will prove to be the one on Truth and
Falsity. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the
relativity of truth, on "Appearance and Reality,"
on " perceptual flux " versus—" conceptual conceit. "
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for
## p. xi (#29) ##############################################
TRANSLATORS PREFACE XI
existence, a means taking the place of the animal's
horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to de-
ception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative
and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed
by convention and utility are set down as truth.
The liar does not use these standard coins of the
realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no,
but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X " of a
thing, but indicate only external characteristics.
Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the
cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorph-
isms about which one has forgotten that they are
such. There are different truths to different beings.
Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and
ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of
error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When
the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie
to him without hurting him he—loves them! —
The text underlying this translation is that of
Vol. I. of the "Taschenausgabe. " One or two
obscure passages I hope my conjectures may have
elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate
the year when these essays were written.
In no other work have I felt so deeply the great
need of the science of Signifies with its ultimate
international standardisation of terms, as attempted
by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have
succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning
of the author in spite of a certain looseness in his
philosophical terminology.
## p. xii (#30) #############################################
Xll TRANSLATORS PREFACE
The English language is somewhat at a dis-
advantage through its lack of a Noun-Infinitive.
I can best illustrate this by a passage from Par-
menides:
\pT) to \iy(iv T( votlv T ibv Ififuvac «m yap uvai,
pufiiv 8* ovk (OTiv to <r iyto <f>pd£to&ai avorya.
In his usual masterly manner Diels translates
these lines with: "Das Sagen und Denken musz
ein Seiendes sein. Denn das Sein existiert, das
Nichts existiert nicht; das heisz ich dich wohl zu
beherzigen. " On the other hand in Fairbanks'
"version" we read: "It is necessary both to say
and to think that being is; for it is possible that
being is, and it is impossible that not being is;
this is what I bid thee ponder. " In order to
avoid a similar obscurity, throughout the paper on
"Early Greek Philosophy" I have rendered
"das Seiende" (to ibv) with "Existent", "das
Nicht-Seiende " with " Non-Existent"; "das Sein"
(thai) with "Being" and "das Nicht-Sein" with
"Not-Being. "
I am directly or indirectly indebted for many
suggestions to several friends of mine, especially to
two of my colleagues, J. Charlton Hipkins, M. A. ,
and R. Miller, B. A. , for their patient revision of
the whole of the proofs.
M. A. MUGGE.
London, July 1911.
## p.
"
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for
## p. xi (#29) ##############################################
TRANSLATORS PREFACE XI
existence, a means taking the place of the animal's
horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to de-
ception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative
and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed
by convention and utility are set down as truth.
The liar does not use these standard coins of the
realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no,
but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X " of a
thing, but indicate only external characteristics.
Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the
cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorph-
isms about which one has forgotten that they are
such. There are different truths to different beings.
Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and
ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of
error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When
the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie
to him without hurting him he—loves them! —
The text underlying this translation is that of
Vol. I. of the "Taschenausgabe. " One or two
obscure passages I hope my conjectures may have
elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate
the year when these essays were written.
In no other work have I felt so deeply the great
need of the science of Signifies with its ultimate
international standardisation of terms, as attempted
by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have
succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning
of the author in spite of a certain looseness in his
philosophical terminology.
## p. xii (#30) #############################################
Xll TRANSLATORS PREFACE
The English language is somewhat at a dis-
advantage through its lack of a Noun-Infinitive.
I can best illustrate this by a passage from Par-
menides:
\pT) to \iy(iv T( votlv T ibv Ififuvac «m yap uvai,
pufiiv 8* ovk (OTiv to <r iyto <f>pd£to&ai avorya.
In his usual masterly manner Diels translates
these lines with: "Das Sagen und Denken musz
ein Seiendes sein. Denn das Sein existiert, das
Nichts existiert nicht; das heisz ich dich wohl zu
beherzigen. " On the other hand in Fairbanks'
"version" we read: "It is necessary both to say
and to think that being is; for it is possible that
being is, and it is impossible that not being is;
this is what I bid thee ponder. " In order to
avoid a similar obscurity, throughout the paper on
"Early Greek Philosophy" I have rendered
"das Seiende" (to ibv) with "Existent", "das
Nicht-Seiende " with " Non-Existent"; "das Sein"
(thai) with "Being" and "das Nicht-Sein" with
"Not-Being. "
I am directly or indirectly indebted for many
suggestions to several friends of mine, especially to
two of my colleagues, J. Charlton Hipkins, M. A. ,
and R. Miller, B. A. , for their patient revision of
the whole of the proofs.
M. A. MUGGE.
London, July 1911.
## p. 1 (#31) ###############################################
The Greek State
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1871)
## p. 2 (#32) ###############################################
## p. 3 (#33) ###############################################
We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks
in two ideas, which are given as it were as a com-
pensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly
and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the
word " slave " : we talk of the "dignity of man " and
of the " dignity of labour. " Everybody worries in
order miserably to perpetuate a miserable exist-
ence; this awful need compels him to consuming
labour; man (or, more exactly, the human intellect)
seduced by the " Will" now occasionally marvels at
labour as something dignified. However in order
that labour might have a claim on titles of honour,
it would be necessary above all, that Existence itself,
to which labour after all is only a painful means,
should have more dignity and value than it appears
to have had, up to the present, to serious philo-
sophies and religions. What else may we find in the
labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to
exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse
by which stunted plants stretch their roots through
earthless rocks!
Out of this awful struggle for existence only
individuals can emerge, and they are at once
occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture,
lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which
Nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern
world, which, compared with the Greek, usually pro-
## p. 4 (#34) ###############################################
4 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
duces only abnormalities and centaurs, in which
the individual, like that fabulous creature in the
beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled
together out of pieces, here in the modern world in
one and the same man the greed of the struggle
for existence and the need for art show themselves
at the same time: out of this unnatural amalgama-
tion has originated the dilemma, to excuse and to
consecrate that first greed before this need for art.
Therefore we believe in the " Dignity of man " and
the " Dignity of labour. "
The Greeks did not require such conceptual
hallucinations, for among them the idea that labour
is a disgrace is expressed with startling frankness;
and another piece of wisdom, more hidden and less
articulate, but everywhere alive, added that the
human thing also was an ignominious and piteous
nothing and the "dream of a shadow. " Labour is
a disgrace, because existence has no value in itself;
but even though this very existence in the alluring
embellishment of artistic illusions shines forth and
really seems to have a value in itself, then that pro-
position is still valid that labour is a disgrace—a
disgrace indeed by the fact that it is impossible for
man, fighting for the continuance of bare exist-
ence, to become an artist. In modern times it is
not the art-needing man but the slave who deter-
mines the general conceptions, the slave who
according to his nature must give deceptive names
to all conditions in order to be able to live. Such
phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of
labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding
itself from itself. Woful time, in which the slave
"N
## p. 5 (#35) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 5
requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to
think about and beyond himself! Cursed seducers,
who have destroyed the slave's state of innocence
by the fruit of the tree of knowledge! Now the
slave must vainly scrape through from one day to
another with transparent lies recognisable to every
one of deeper insight, such as the alleged "equal
rights of all" or the so-called " fundamental rights
of man," of man as such, or the "dignity of labour. "
Indeed he is not to understand at what stage and
at what height dignity can first be mentioned—
namely, at the point, where the individual goes
wholly beyond himself and no longer has to work
and to produce in order to preserve his individual
existence.
And even on this height of " labour" the Greek
at times is overcome by a feeling, that looks like
shame. In one place Plutarch with earlier Greek
instinct says that no nobly born youth on beholding
the Zeus in Pisa would have the desire to become
himself a Phidias, or on seeing the Hera in Argos,
to become himself a Polyklet; and just as little would
he wish to be Anacreon, Philetas or Archilochus,
however much he might revel in their poetry. To
the Greek the work of the artist falls just as much
under the undignified conception of labour as any
ignoble craft. But if the compelling force of the
artistic impulse operates in him, then he must pro-
duce and submit himself to that need of labour.
And as a father admires the beauty and the gift of
his child but thinks of the act of procreation with
shamefaced dislike, so it was with the Greek. The
joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded
## p. 6 (#36) ###############################################
6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
him as to its origin which appeared to him, like all
"Becoming" in nature, to be a powerful necessity,
a forcing of itself into existence. That feeling by
which the process of procreation is considered as
something shamefacedly to be hidden, although by
it man serves a higher purpose than his individual
preservation, the same feeling veiled also the origin
of the great works of art, in spite of the fact that
through them a higher form of existence is inaugu-
rated, just as through that other act comes a new
generation. The feeling of skame seems therefore
to occur where man is merely a tool of manifesta-
tions of will infinitely greater than he is permitted
to consider himself in the isolated shape of the
individual.
Now we have the general idea to which are to be
subordinated the feelings which the Greek had with
regard to labour and slavery. Both were considered
by them as a necessary disgrace, of which one feels
ashamed, as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same
time. In this feeling of shame is hidden the uncon-
scious discernment that the real aim needs those
conditional factors, but that in that need lies the
fearful and beast-of-prey-like quality of the Sphinx
Nature, who in the glorification of the artistically
free culture-life so beautifully stretches forth her
virgin-body. Culture, which is chiefly a real need
for art, rests upon a terrible basis: the latter how-
ever makes itself known in the twilight sensation of
shame. In order that there may be a broad, deep,
and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enor-
mous majority must, in the service of a minority,
be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater
## p. 7 (#37) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 7
degree than their own wants necessitate. At their
cost, through the surplus of their labour, that
privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle
for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a
new world of want.
Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding
truth, that slavery is of the essence of Culture; a truth
of course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute
value of Existence. This truth is the vulture, that
gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of
Culture. The misery of toiling men must still in-
crease in order to make the production of the world
of art possible to a small number of Olympian men.
Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath
nourished by Communists and Socialists of all times,
and also by their feebler descendants, the white race
of the " Liberals," not only against the arts, but also
against classical antiquity. If Culture really rested
upon the will of a people, if here inexorable powers
did not rule, powers which are law and barrier to the
individual, then the contempt for Culture, the glori-
fication of a "poorness in spirit," the iconoclastic
annihilation of artistic claims would be more than an
insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-
like individuals; it would be the cry of compassion
tearing down the walls of Culture; the desire for
justice, for the equalization of suffering, would
swamp all other ideas. In fact here and there some-
times an exuberant degree of compassion has for a
short time opened all theflood gates of Culture-life ; a
rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared
with the first radiant rise of Christianity and under
it was born Christianity's most, beautiful fruit, the
## p. 8 (#38) ###############################################
8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
gospel according to St John. But there are also
instances to show that powerful religions for long
periods petrify a given degree of Culture, and cut
off with inexorable sickle everything that still grows
on strongly and luxuriantly. For it is not to be for-
gotten that the same cruelty, which we found in the
essence of every Culture, lies also in the essence
of every powerful religion and in general in the
essence of power, which is always evil; so that we
shall understand it just as well, when a Culture is
shattering, with a cry for liberty or at least justice,
a too highly piled bulwark of religious claims. That
which in this "sorry scheme" of things will live
(i. e. , must live), is at the bottom of its nature a reflex
of the primal-pain and primal-contradiction, and
must therefore strike our eyes—" an organ fashioned
for this world and earth"—as an insatiable greed
for existence and an eternal self-contradiction, within
the form of time, therefore as Becoming. Every
moment devours the preceding one, every birth is
the death of innumerable beings; begetting, living,
murdering, all is one. Therefore we may compare
this grand Culture with a blood-stained victor, who
in his triumphal procession carries the defeated along
as slaves chained to his chariot, slaves whom a bene-
ficent power has so blinded that, almost crushed
by the wheels of the chariot, they nevertheless still
exclaim: "Dignity of labour! " " Dignity of Man! "
The voluptuous Cleopatra-Culture throws ever again
the most priceless pearls, the tears of compassion for
the misery of slaves, into her golden goblet. Out of
the emasculation of modern man has been born the
enormous social distress of the present time, not out
## p. 9 (#39) ###############################################
THE GREEK STATE 9
of the true and deep commiseration for that misery;
and if it should be true that the Greeks perished
through their slavedom then another fact is much
more certain, that we shall perish through the lack
of slavery. Slavedom did not appear in any way
objectionable, much less abominable, either to early
Christianity or to the Germanic race. What an
uplifting effect on us has the contemplation of the
mediaeval bondman, with his legal and moral rela-
tions,—relations that were inwardly strong and
tender,—towards the man of higher rank, with the
profound fencing-in of his narrow existence—how
uplifting! —and how reproachful!
He who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs
in Society without melancholy, who has learnt to
conceive of it as the continual painful birth of those
privileged Culture-men, in whose service everything
else must be devoured—he will no longer be de-
ceived by that false glamour, which the moderns
have spread over the origin and meaning of the
State. For what can the State mean to us, if not
the means by which that social-process described
just now is to be fused and to be guaranteed in its
unimpeded continuance? Be the sociable instinct
in individual man as strong as it may, it is only the
iron clamp of the State that constrains the large
masses upon one another in such a fashion that a
chemical decomposition of Society, with its pyra-
mid-like superstructure, is bound to take place.
Whence however originates this sudden power of
the State, whose aim lies much beyond the insight
and beyond the egoism of the individual? How
did the slave, the blind mole of Culture, originate?
## p. 10 (#40) ##############################################
IO VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
The Greeks in their instinct relating to the law of
nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct, which
even in the ripest fulness of their civilisation and
humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen
mouth such words as: "to the victor belongs the
vanquished, with wife and child, life and property.
Power gives thefirst right,axi& there is no right, which
at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence. "
Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility
Nature, in order to arrive at Society, forges for her-
self the cruel tool of the State—namely, that con-
queror with the iron hand, who is nothing else than
the objectivation of the instinct indicated. By the
indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors
the spectator feels, that they are only the means of
an intention manifesting itself through them and
yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces
attach themselves to them with such mysterious
speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in
the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under
the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity
hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic
will were emanating from them.
Now when we see how little the vanquished
trouble themselves after a short time about the
horrible origin of the State, so that history informs
us of no class of events worse than the origins of
those sudden, violent, bloody and, at least in one
point, inexplicable usurpations: when hearts invol-
untarily go out towards the magic of the growing
State with the presentiment of an invisible deep
purpose, where the calculating intellect is enabled to
see an addition of forces only; when now the State
## p. 11 (#41) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE II
is even contemplated with fervour as the goal and
ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the indi-
vidual: then out of all that speaks the enormous
necessity of the State, without which Nature might
not succeed in coming, through Society, to her de-
liverance in semblance, in the mirror of the genius.
What discernments does the instinctive pleasure in
the State not overcome! One would indeed feel
inclined to think that a man who looks into the
origin of the State will henceforth seek his salva-
tion at an awful distance from it; and where can
one not see the monuments of its origin—devastated
lands, destroyed cities, brutalised men, devouring
hatred of nations! The State, of ignominiously low
birth, for the majority of men a continually flowing
source of hardship, at frequently recurring periods
the consuming torch of mankind—and yet a word,
at which we forget ourselves, a battle cry, which has
filled men with enthusiasm for innumerable really
heroic deeds, perhaps the highest and most venerable
object for the blind and egoistic multitude which
only in the tremendous moments of State-life has
the strange expression of greatness on its face!
We have, however, to consider the Greeks, with
regard to the unique sun-height of their art, as the
"political men in themselves," and certainly history
knows of no second instance of such an awful un-
chaining of the political passion, such an uncondi-
tional immolation of all other interests in the service
of this State-instinct; at the best one might dis-
tinguish the men of the Renascence in Italy with a
similar title for like reasons and by way of com-
parison. So overloaded is that passion among the
## p. 12 (#42) ##############################################
12 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself
and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This
bloody jealousy of city against city, of party against
party, this murderous greed of those little wars,
the tiger-like triumph over the corpse of the slain
enemy, in short, the incessant renewal of those
Trojan scenes of struggle and horror, in the spec-
tacle of which, as a genuine Hellene, Homer stands
before us absorbed with delight—whither does this
naive barbarism of the Greek State point? What
is its excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice?
Proud and calm, the State steps before this tribunal
and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming
womanhood: Greek society. For this Helena the
State waged those wars—and what grey-bearded
judge could here condemn? —
Under this mysterious connection, which we here
divine between State and art, political greed and
artistic creation, battlefield and work of art, we
understand by the State, as already remarked, only
the cramp-iron, which compels the Social process;
whereas without the State, in the natural bellum om-
nium contra omnes Society cannot strike root at all
on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family.
Now, after States have been established almost
everywhere, that bent of the bellum omnium contra
omnes concentrates itself from time to time into a
terrible gathering of war-clouds and discharges itself
as it were in rare but so much the more violent
shocks and lightning flashes. But in consequence
of the effect of that bellum,—an effect which is turned
inwards and compressed,—Society is given time
during the intervals to germinate and burst into leaf,
## p. 13 (#43) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE I3
in order, as soon as warmer days come, to let the
shining blossoms of genius sprout forth.
In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I
will not hide those phenomena of the present in
which I believe I discern dangerous atrophies of the
political sphere equally critical for art and society.
If thereshould exist men,who as itwerethrough birth
are placed outside the national- and State-instincts,
who consequently have to esteem the State only in so
far as they conceive that it coincides with their own
interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as
the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed col-
lateral existence of great political communities pos-
sible, in which they might be permitted to pursue their
own purposes without restriction. With this idea in
their heads they will promote that policy which will
offer the greatest security to these purposes; whereas
it is unthinkable, that they, against their intentions,
guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct, should
sacrifice themselves for the State-tendency, unthink-
able because they lack that very instinct. All other
citizens of the State are in the dark about what
Nature intends with her State-instinct within them,
and they follow blindly; only those who stand
outside this instinct know what they want from the
State and what the State is to grant them. There-
fore it is almost unavoidable that such men
should gain great influence in the State because
they are allowed to consider it as a means, whereas
all the others under the sway of those unconscious
purposes of the State are themselves only means
for the fulfilment of the State-purpose. In order
now to attain, through the medium of the State,
## p. 14 (#44) ##############################################
14 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the highest furtherance of their selfish aims, it is
above all necessary, that the State be wholly freed
from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so
that it may be used rationally; and thereby they
strive with all their might for a condition of things
in which war is an impossibility. For that purpose
the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the
political separatisms and factions and through the
establishment of large equipoised State-bodies and
the mutual safeguarding of them to make the suc-
cessful result of an aggressive war and consequently
war itself the greatest improbability; as on the other
hand they will endeavour to wrest the question of
war and peace from the decision of individual lords,
in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism
of the masses or their representatives; for which
purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the
monarchic instincts of the nations. This purpose
they attain best through the most general promul-
gation of the liberal optimistic view of the world,
which has its roots in the doctrines of French
Rationalism and the French Revolution, i. e. , in a
wholly un-Germanic, genuinely neo-Latin shallow
and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help
seeing in the prevailing international movements
of the present day, and the simultaneous promulga-
tion of universal suffrage, the effects of the fear
of war above everything else, yea I behold behind
these movements, those truly international home-
less money-hermits, as the really alarmed, who,
with their natural lack of the State-instinct, have
learnt to abuse politics as a means of the Exchange,
and State and Society as an apparatus for their own
## p. 15 (#45) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE IS
enrichment. Against the deviation of the State-
tendency into a money-tendency, to be feared from
this side, the only remedy is war and once again
war, in the emotions of which this at least becomes
obvious, that the State is not founded upon the fear
of the war-demon, as a protective institution for
egoistic individuals, but in love to fatherland and
prince, it produces an ethical impulse, indicative of
a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as
a dangerous and characteristic sign of the present
political situation the application of revolutionary
thought in the service of a selfish State-less
money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive
of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism
as the result of modern financial affairs fallen
into strange hands, and if I imagine all evils
of social conditions together with the necessary
decay of the arts to have either germinated from
that root or grown together with it, one will have
to pardon my occasionally chanting a Psean on war.
Horribly clangs its silvery bow; and although it
comes along like the night, war is nevertheless
Apollo, the true divinity for consecrating and puri-
fying the State. First of all, however, as is said in
the beginning of the "Iliad," he lets fly his arrow
on the mules and dogs. Then he strikes the men
themselves, and everywhere pyres break into flames.
Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a
necessity for the State as the slave is for society,
and who can avoid this verdict if he honestly asks
himself about the causes of the never-equalled Greek
art-perfection?
He who contemplates war and its uniformed pos-
## p. 16 (#46) ##############################################
16 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
sibility, the soldier's profession, with respect to the
hitherto described nature of the State, must arrive
at the conviction, that through war and in the pro-
fession of arms is placed before our eyes an image,
or even perhaps the prototype of the State. Here we
see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an
immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic
mass into military castes, out of which rises, pyramid-
shaped, on an exceedingly broad base of slaves the
edifice of the "martial society. " The unconscious
purpose of the whole movement constrains every in-
dividual under its yoke, and produces also in hetero-
geneous natures as it were a chemical transformation
of their qualities until they are brought into affinity
with that purpose. In the highest castes one per-
ceives already a little more of what in this internal
process is involved at the bottom, namely the crea-
tion of the military genius—with whom we have
become acquainted as the original founder of states.
In the case of many States, as, for example, in the
Lycurgian constitution of Sparta, one can distinctly
perceive the impress of that fundamental idea of the
State, that of the creation of the military genius. If
we now imagine the military primal State in its
greatest activity, at its proper " labour," and if we
fix our glance upon the whole technique of war,
we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked up
from everywhere, as to the "dignity of man" and
the "dignity of labour" by the question, whether
the idea of dignity is applicable also to that labour,
which has as its purpose the destruction of the
"dignified" man, as well as to the man who is
entrusted with that "dignified labour," or whether
## p. 17 (#47) ##############################################
THE GREEK STATE 17
in this warlike task of the State those mutually
contradictory ideas do not neutralise one another. I
should like to think the warlike man to be a means
of the military genius and his labour again only
a tool in the hands of that same genius; and not
to him, as absolute man and non-genius, but to him
as a means of the genius—whose pleasure also can
be to choose his tool's destruction as a mere pawn
sacrificed on the strategist's chessboard—is due a
degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have
been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius.
But what is shown here in a single instance is valid
in the most general sense; every human being, with
his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is
a tool of the genius, consciously or unconsciously;
from this we may immediately deduce the ethical
conclusion, that "man in himself," the absolute man
possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties;
only as a wholly determined being serving uncon-
scious purposes can man excuse his existence.
Plato's perfect State is according to these con-
siderations certainly something still greater than
even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe,
not to mention the smiling mien of superiority with
which our "historically" educated refuse such a
fruit of antiquity. The proper aim of the State,
the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procrea-
tion and preparation of the genius,—compared with
which all other things are only tools, expedients
and factors towards realisation—is here discovered
with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness.
Plato saw through the awfully devastated Herma
of the then-existing State-life and perceived even
## p. 18 (#48) ##############################################
I8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
then something divine in its interior. He believed
that one might be able to take out this divine image
and that the grim and barbarically distorted out-
side and shell did not belong to the essence of the
State: the whole fervour and sublimity of his politi-
cal passion threw itself upon this belief, upon that
desire—and in the flames of this fire he perished.
That in his perfect State he did not place at the
head the genius in its general meaning, but only
the genius of wisdom and of knowledge, that he
altogether excluded the inspired artist from his
State, that was a rigid consequence of the Socratian
judgment on art, which Plato, struggling against
himself, had made his own. This more external,
almost incidental gap must not prevent our recog-
nising in the total conception of the Platonic State
the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a profound and
eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the
connection between State and Genius. What we be-
lieved we could divine of this cryptograph we have
said in this preface.
N
## p. 19 (#49) ##############################################
The Greek Woman
(Fragment, 1871)
## p. 20 (#50) ##############################################
## p. 21 (#51) ##############################################
Just as Plato from disguises and obscurities brought
^to light the innermost purpose of the State, so also
he conceived the chief cause of the position of the
Hellenic Woman with regard to the State; in both
cases he saw in what existed around him the image
of the ideas manifested to him, and of these ideas
of course the actual was only a hazy picture and
phantasmagoria. He who according to the usual
custom considers the position of the Hellenic Woman
to be altogether unworthy and repugnant to human-
ity, must also turn with this reproach against the
Platonic conception of this position; for, as it were,
the existing forms were only precisely set forth in
this latter conception. Here therefore our question
repeats itself: should not the nature and the position
of the Hellenic Woman have a necessary relation to
the goals of the Hellenic Will?
Of course there is one side of the Platonic con-
ception of woman, which stands in abrupt contrast
with Hellenic custom: Plato gives to woman a full
share in the rights, knowledge and duties of man,
and considers woman only as the weaker sex, in
that she will not achieve remarkable success in all
things, without however disputing this sex's title to
all those things. We must not attach more value to
this strange notion than to the expulsion of the artist
out of the ideal State; these are side-lines daringly
## p. 22 (#52) ##############################################
22 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
mis-drawn, aberrations as it were of the hand other-
wise so sure and of the so calmly contemplating
eye which at times under the influence of the de-
ceased master becomes dim and dejected; in this
mood he exaggerates the master's paradoxes and
in the abundance of his love gives himself satisfac-
tion by very eccentrically intensifying the latter's
doctrines even to foolhardiness.
The most significant word however that Plato as
a Greek could say on the relation of woman to the
State, was that so objectionable demand, that in the
perfect State, the Family was to cease. At present let
us take no account of his abolishing even marriage,
in order to carry out this demand fully, and of his
substituting solemn nuptials arranged by order of
the State, between the bravest men and the noblest
women, for the attainment of beautiful offspring.
In that principal proposition however he has in-
dicated most distinctly—indeed too distinctly, offen-
sively distinctly—an important preparatory step of
the Hellenic Will towards the procreation of the
genius. But in the customs of the Hellenic people
the claim of the family on man and child was
extremely limited: the man lived in the State, the
child grew up for the State and was guided by the
hand of the State. The Greek Will took care that
the need of culture could not be satisfied in the
seclusion of a small circle. From the State the
individual has to receive everything in order to
return everything to the State. Woman accord-
ingly means to the State, what sleep does to man.
In her nature lies the healing power, which replaces
that which has been used up, the beneficial rest in
## p. 23 (#53) ##############################################
THE GREEK WOMAN 23
which everything immoderate confines itself, the
eternal Same, by which the excessive and the surplus
regulate themselves. In her the future generation
dreams. Woman is more closely related to Nature
than man and in all her essentials she remains ever
herself. Culture is with her always something ex-
ternal, a something which does not touch the kernel
that is eternally faithful to Nature, therefore the
culture of woman might well appear to the Athenian
as something indifferent, yea—if one only wanted to
conjure it up in one's mind, as something ridiculous.
He who at once feels himself compelled from that
to infer the position of women among the Greeks as
unworthy and all too cruel, should not indeed take
as his criterion the " culture " of modern woman and
her claims, against which it is sufficient just to point
out the Olympian women together with Penelope,
Antigone, Elektra. Of course it is true that these
are ideal figures, but who would be able to create
such ideals out of the present world ? —Further in-
deed is to be considered what sons these women
have borne, and what women they must have been
to have given birth to such sons! The Hellenic
woman as viother had to live in obscurity, because
the political instinct together with its highest aim
demanded it. She had to vegetate like a plant, in
the narrow circle, as a symbol of the Epicurean
wisdom Aa0e /ftwo-as. Again, in more recent times,
with the complete disintegration of the principle of
the State, she had to step in as helper; the family
as a makeshift for the State is her work; and in this
sense the artistic aim of the State had to abase
itself to the level of a domestic art. Thereby it has
## p. 24 (#54) ##############################################
24 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
been brought about, that the passion of love, as the
one realm wholly accessible to women, regulates our
art to the very core. Similarly, home-education
considers itself so to speak as the only natural one
and suffers State-education only as a questionable
infringement upon the right of home-education: all
this is right as far as the modern State only is
concerned. —With that the nature of woman withal
remains unaltered, but her power is, according to
the position which the State takes up with regard
to women, a different one. Women have indeed
really the power to make good to a certain extent
the deficiencies of the State—ever faithful to their
nature, which I have compared to sleep. In Greek
antiquity they held that position, which the most
supreme will of the State assigned to them: for
that reason they have been glorified as never since.
The goddesses of Greek mythology are their images:
the Pythia and the Sibyl, as well as the Socratic
Diotima are the priestesses out of whom divine
wisdom speaks. Now one understands why the
proud resignation of the Spartan woman at the
news of her son's death in battle can be no fable.
Woman in relation to the State felt herself in her
proper position, therefore she had more dignity than
woman has ever had since. Plato who through
abolishing family and marriage still intensifies the
position of woman, feels now so much reverence
towards them, that oddly enough he is misled by a
subsequent statement of their equality with man, to
abolish again the order of rank which is their due:
the highest triumph of the woman of antiquity, to
have seduced even the wisest!
## p. 25 (#55) ##############################################
THE GREEK WOMAN 2$
As long as the State is still in an embryonic con-
dition woman as mother preponderates and deter-
mines the grade and the manifestations of Culture:
in the same way as woman is destined to comple-
ment the disorganised State.
