“The misery of those who live by labour must be made yet more rigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.” (Unnecessary to say that the son of the Pastor of Naumburg was to have a life membership of Olympus.) “At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such new conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is most certainly even truer; for lack of slavery, we are perishing.”
The reader can but be astonished at the modesty of the slightly impecunious professor from Basel. Why did he not call himself a god? Why a mere superman?
On the subject of God and gods, however, he had views of his own. Just as Fichte used to say to his philosophical students at a certain point in the course: “To-morrow, gentlemen, I will proceed to create God!” so Nietzsche was never tired of repeating: “I have killed God!” His argument is very simple—
“If there did exist gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”
As to that special mode of worship called Christianity, upon which all justice, love, pity, and help of our neighbours, is in the tradition of Europe, immovably based, he is unable to speak with even a colour of sanity.
“The Christian concept of God—God as the deity of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that have ever been attained on earth.” Christianity and alcohol are “the two great instruments of corruption.”
That he said, “You are going among women. Do not forget your whip!” I do not regard as essential to his philosophy. Most men have said angry things about women at one time or other. But it does happen that the position of women is more abject in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. And it does happen that Nietzsche also said—
“For man, happiness lies in the formula, I desire. For woman, in the formula, he desires.”
And also “man is to be reared for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior. All the rest is folly.”
Did Hauptmann’s Germans, one wonders, whip out their new knapsack Bibles and run over this text before they entered Aerschot and Louvain?