Wherever we find anything akin to "pity," even in nature: the suckling of the young, the maintenance of dependants (the lion's attitude towards the jackal), the protection of the helpless young (as in many fish and mammals), it is always the superabundance of the giver and his Will to Power which creates the pitiful act.
But the pity which most of us understand as a virtue in Europe to-day, is merely a sort of sickly sensitiveness and irritability towards pain, an effeminate absence of control in the presence of suffering, which has nothing whatever to do with our powers of alleviating the misery we contemplate, and which is only compatible either with excessive sentimentality or with weak and overstrained nerves. In that case all it does is to add to the misery of this world, and to elevate to a virtue that which is perhaps one of the saddest signs of the times. It is then indiscriminate, rash, and short-sighted, and gives rise to more evil than it tries to dispel.
"Ah, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the pitiful? And what in the world hath caused more suffering than the follies of the pitiful?
"Woe unto all loving ones who have not an elevation which is above their pity!"[10]
The legislator or the leader (and it is to him, remember, that Nietzsche appeals), is often obliged to leave dozens to die by the wayside, and has to do so with a clean conscience. If the march he is organising requires certain sacrifices, he must be ready to make them; the slavish pity, then, which would sacrifice the greater to the less, must have been overcome by him in his own heart., and he must have learnt that hardness which is wider in its sympathies, more presbyopic in its love, and less immediate in its effect. But he alone can feel like this who has something to give to those he leads, i.e. his protection and guidance, his promise of a better land.
"Myself I would sacrifice to my design, and my neighbour as well—such is the language of creators.
"All creators, however, are hard."[11]
Now turning to the question of egoism cru et vert, which, according to some, is the very basis and core of Nietzscheism, what are the points which strike us most in Nietzsche's standpoint? To begin with, in this question, as in all others, his honesty is paramount, and we become conscious of it the moment we read his first line on the subject. Where Nietzsche discusses matters of which others are wont to speak with heaving breasts, florid language, and tearful voices, he takes particular pains to be clear, concise, calculating and cold—hence perhaps the hatred he has provoked in those who depend for their effect upon the impression of benevolence which their watery eyes, their cracked, good-natured voices, and their high-falutin' words make upon a multitude.
Nietzsche puts his linger on the very centre of the question of egoism, he simply says: "Not every one has the right to be an egoist. Whereas in some egoism would be a virtue, in others it may be an insufferable vice which should be stamped out at all costs."
In whom then is egoism a vice?