It appears to him that the modern age has produced for imitation three particular types of man, one after the other. First Rousseau's man; the Titan who raises himself, oppressed and bound by the higher castes, and in his need calls upon holy Nature. Then Goethe's man; not Werther or the revolutionary figures related to him, who are still derived from Rousseau, nor the original Faust figure, but Faust as he gradually develops. He is no liberator, but a spectator, of the world. He is not the man of action. Nietzsche reminds us of Jarno's words to Wilhelm Meister: "You are vexed and bitter, that is a very good thing. If you could be thoroughly angry for once, it would be better still."
To become thoroughly angry in order to make things better, this, in the view of the Nietzsche of thirty, will be the exhortation of Schopenhauer's man. This man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth. His fundamental idea is this: A life of happiness is impossible; the highest a man can attain to is a heroic life, one in which he fights against the greatest difficulties for something which, in one way or another, will be for the good of all. To what is truly human, only true human beings can raise us; those who seem to have come into being by a leap in Nature; thinkers and educators, artists and creators, and those who influence us more by their nature than by their activity: the noble, the good in a grand style, those in whom the genius of good is at work.
These men are the aim of history.
Nietzsche formulates this proposition: "Humanity must work unceasingly for the production of solitary great men—this and nothing else is its task." This is the same formula at which several aristocratic spirits among his contemporaries have arrived. Thus Renan says, almost in the same words: "In fine, the object of humanity is the production of great men ... nothing but great men; salvation will come from great men." And we see from Flaubert's letters to George Sand how convinced he was of the same thing. He says, for instance: "The only rational thing is and always will be a government of mandarins, provided that the mandarins can do something, or rather, can do much.... It matters little whether a greater or smaller number of peasants are able to read instead of listening to their priest, but it is infinitely important that many men like Renan and Littré may live and be heard. Our salvation now lies in a real aristocracy."[4] Both Renan and Flaubert would have subscribed to Nietzsche's fundamental idea that a nation is the roundabout way Nature goes in order to produce a dozen great men.
Yet, although the idea does not lack advocates, this does not make it a dominant thought in European philosophy. In Germany, for instance, Eduard von Hartmann thinks very differently of the aim—of history. His published utterances on the subject are well known. In conversation he once hinted how his idea had originated in his mind: "It was clear to me long ago," he said, "that history, or, to use a wider expression, the world process, must have an aim, and that this aim could only be negative. For a golden age is too foolish a figment." Hence his visions of a destruction of the world voluntarily brought about by the most gifted men. And connected with this is his doctrine that humanity has now reached man's estate, that is, has passed the stage of development in which geniuses were necessary.
In the face of all this talk of the world process, the aim of which is annihilation or deliverance—deliverance even of the suffering godhead from existence—Nietzsche takes a very sober and sensible stand with his simple belief that the goal of humanity is not to be infinitely deferred, but must be found in the highest examples of humanity itself.
And herewith he has arrived at his final answer to the question, What is culture? For upon this relation depend the fundamental idea of culture and the duties culture imposes. It imposes on me the duty of associating myself by my own activity with the great human ideals. Its fundamental idea is this: it assigns to every individual who wishes to work for it and participate in it, the task of striving to produce, within and without himself, the thinker and artist, the lover of truth and beauty, the pure and good personality, and thereby striving for the perfection of Nature, towards the goal of a perfected Nature.
When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.
But does such a state exist? perhaps some one will ask. Most of the smaller nations will be able to read the answer in the history of their native land. It will there be seen, in proportion as "refinement" grows, that the refined atmosphere is diffused, which is unfavourable to genius. And this is all the more serious, since many people think that in modern times and in the races which now share the dominion of the world among them, a political community of only a few millions is seldom sufficiently numerous to produce minds of the very first order. It looks as if geniuses could only be distilled from some thirty or forty millions of people. Norway with Ibsen, Belgium with Maeterlinck and Verhaeren are exceptions. All the more reason is there for the smaller communities to work at culture to their utmost capacity.
In recent times we have become familiar with the thought that the goal to be aimed at is happiness, the happiness of all, or at any rate of the greatest number. Wherein happiness consists is less frequently discussed, and yet it is impossible to avoid the question, whether a year, a day, an hour in Paradise does not bring more happiness than a lifetime in the chimney-corner. But be that as it may: owing to our familiarity with the notion of making sacrifices for a whole country, a multitude of people, it appears unreasonable that a man should exist for the sake of a few other men, that it should be his duty to devote his life to them in order thereby to promote culture. But nevertheless the answer to the question of culture—how the individual human life may acquire its highest value and its greatest significance—must be: By being lived for the benefit of the rarest and most valuable examples of the human race. This will also be the way in which the individual can best impart a value to the life of the greatest number.