So far, this is perhaps the most important paragraph. It is a protest against reading a moral order of things in life. “Life is something essentially immoral!” Nietzsche tells us in the introduction to the “Birth of Tragedy”. Even to call life “activity,” or to define it further as “the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations,” as Spencer has it, Nietzsche characterises as a “democratic idiosyncracy.” He says to define it in this way, “is to mistake the true nature and function of life, which is Will to Power.... Life is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation and at least, putting it mildest, exploitation.” Adaptation is merely a secondary activity, a mere re-activity (see Note on Chapter LVII.).
Pars. 11, 12.
These deal with Nietzsche’s principle of the desirability of rearing a select race. The biological and historical grounds for his insistence upon this principle are, of course, manifold. Gobineau in his great work, “L’Inegalite des Races Humaines”, lays strong emphasis upon the evils which arise from promiscuous and inter-social marriages. He alone would suffice to carry Nietzsche’s point against all those who are opposed to the other conditions, to the conditions which would have saved Rome, which have maintained the strength of the Jewish race, and which are strictly maintained by every breeder of animals throughout the world. Darwin in his remarks relative to the degeneration of CULTIVATED types of animals through the action of promiscuous breeding, brings Gobineau support from the realm of biology.
The last two verses of par. 12 were discussed in the Notes on Chapters XXXVI. and LIII.
Par. 13.
This, like the first part of “The Soothsayer”, is obviously a reference to the Schopenhauerian Pessimism.
Pars. 14, 15, 16, 17.
These are supplementary to the discourse “Backworld’s-men”.
Par. 18.
We must be careful to separate this paragraph, in sense, from the previous four paragraphs. Nietzsche is still dealing with Pessimism here; but it is the pessimism of the hero—the man most susceptible of all to desperate views of life, owing to the obstacles that are arrayed against him in a world where men of his kind are very rare and are continually being sacrificed. It was to save this man that Nietzsche wrote. Heroism foiled, thwarted, and wrecked, hoping and fighting until the last, is at length overtaken by despair, and renounces all struggle for sleep. This is not the natural or constitutional pessimism which proceeds from an unhealthy body—the dyspeptic’s lack of appetite; it is rather the desperation of the netted lion that ultimately stops all movement, because the more it moves the more involved it becomes.