To risk and to create, this is the meaning of life to the superman. He could not bear to be a man, if man could not be a poet, a maker. To change every “It was” into a “Thus I would have it!”—in this he finds that life may redeem itself. He is moved not by ambition but by a mighty overflowing spendthrift spirit that drives him on; he must remake; for this he compels all things to come to him and into him, in order that they may flow back from him as gifts of his love and his abundance; in this refashioning of things by thought he sees the holiness of life; the greatest events, he knows, are these still creative hours.[245]
He is a man of contrasts, or contradictions; he does not desire to be always the same man; he is a multitude of elements and of men; his value lies precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in the variety of burdens which he can bear, in the extent to which he can stretch his responsibility; in him the antagonistic character of existence is represented and justified. He loves instinct, knows that it is the fountain of all his energies; but he knows, too, the natural delight of æsthetic natures in measure, the pleasure of self-restraint, the exhilaration of the rider on a fiery steed. He is a selective principle, he rejects much; he reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him; he tests the approaching stimulus. He decides slowly; but he holds firmly to a decision made.[246]
He loves and has the qualities which the folk call virtues, but he loves too and shows the qualities which the folk call vices; it is again in this union of opposites that he rises above mediocrity; he is a broad arch that spans two banks lying far apart. The folk on either side fear him; for they cannot calculate on him, or classify him. He is a free spirit, an enemy of all fetters and labels; he belongs to no party, knowing that the man who belongs to a party perforce becomes a liar. He is a sceptic (not that he must appear to be one); freedom from any kind of conviction is a necessary factor in his strength of will. He does not make propaganda or proselytes; he keeps his ideals to himself as distinctions; his opinion is his opinion: another person has not easily a right to it; he has renounced the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody; like everything profound, he loves the mask; he does not descend to familiarity; and is not familiar when people think he is. If he cannot lead, he walks alone.[247]
He has not only intellect; if that were all it would not be enough; he has blood. Behind him is a lineage of culture and ability; lives of danger and distinction; his ancestors have paid the price for what he is, just as most men pay the price for what their ancestors have been. Naturally, then, he has a strong feeling of distance; he sees inequality and gradation, order and rank, everywhere among men. He has the most aristocratic of virtues: intellectual honesty. He does not readily become a friend or an enemy; he honors only his equals, and therefore cannot be the enemy of many; where one despises one cannot wage war. He lacks the power of easy reconciliation; but “retaliation” is as incomprehensible to him as “equal rights.” He remains just even as regards his injurer; despite the strong provocation of personal insult the clear and lofty objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled. He recognizes duties only to his equals; to others he does what he thinks best; he knows that justice is found only among equals. He has that distinctively aristocratic trait, the ability to command and with equal readiness to obey; that is indispensable to his pride. He will not permit himself to be praised; he does what serves his purpose. The essence of him is that he has a purpose, for which he will not hesitate to run all risks, even to sacrifice men, to bend their backs to the worst. That something may exist which is a hundred times more important than the question whether he feels well or unwell, and therefore too whether the others feel well or unwell: this is a fundamental instinct of his nature. To have a purpose, and to cleave to it through all dangers till it be achieved,—that is his great passion, that is himself.[248]
9
How to Make Supermen
It is our task, then, to procreate this synthetic man, who embodies everything and justifies it, and for whom the rest of mankind is but soil; to bring the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, within and without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of nature. In this cultivation lies the meaning of culture: the direction of all life to the end of producing the finest possible individuals. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; his very essence is to create a being higher than himself; that is the instinct of procreation, the instinct of action and of work. Even the higher man himself feels this need of begetting; and for lesser men all virtue and morals lie in preparing the way that the superman may come. There is no greater horror than the degenerating soul which says, “All for myself.” In this great purpose, too, is the essence of a better religion, and a surpassing of the bounds of narrow individualism; with this purpose there come moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light we understand the word “I” no longer; we feel that we are creating, and therefore in a sense becoming, something greater than ourselves.[249]
How to make straight the way for the superman?
First by reforming marriage. Let it be understood at once that love is a hindrance rather than a help to such marriages as are calculated to breed higher men. To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to regard it falsely; that is why love-marriages are from the social point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony. Were there a benevolent God, the marriages of men would cause him more displeasure than anything else; he would observe that all buyers are careful, but that even the most cunning one buys his wife in a sack; and surely he would cause the earth to tremble in convulsions when a saint and a goose couple. When a man is in love, he should not be allowed to come to a decision about his life, and to determine once for all the character of his lifelong society on account of a whim. If we treated marriage seriously, we would publicly declare invalid the vows of lovers, and refuse them permission to marry. We would remake public opinion, so that it would encourage trial marriage; we would exact certificates of health and good ancestry; we would punish bachelorhood by longer military service, and would reward with all sorts of privileges those fathers who should lavish sons upon the world. And above all we would make people understand that the purpose of marriage is not that they should duplicate, but that they should surpass, themselves. Perhaps we would read to them from Zarathustra, with fitting ceremonies and solemnities: “Thou art young, and wishest for child and marriage. But I ask thee, art thou a man who dareth to wish for a child? Art thou the victorious one, the self-subduer, the commander of thy senses, the master of thy virtues?—or in thy wish doth there speak the animal, or necessity? Or solitude? Or discord with thyself? I would that thy victory and freedom were longing for a child. Thou shalt build living monuments unto thy victory and thy liberation. Thou shalt build beyond thyself. But first thou must build thyself square in body and soul. Thou shalt not only propagate thyself, but propagate thyself upward! Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create that one which is more than they who created it. I call marriage reverence unto each other as unto those who will such a will.”[250]
In a word, eugenic marriage; and after eugenic marriage, rigorous education. But interest in education will become powerful only when belief in a God and his care have been abandoned, just as medicine began to flourish only when the belief in miraculous cures had lapsed. When men begin at last to believe in education, they will endure much rather than have their sons miss going to a good and hard school at the proper time. What is it that one learns in a hard school? To obey and to command. For this is what distinguishes hard schooling, as good schooling, from every other schooling, namely that a good deal is demanded, severely exacted; that excellence is required as if it were normal; that praise is scanty, that leniency is non-existent; that blame is sharp, practical, and without reprieve, and has no regard to talent and antecedents. To prefer danger to comfort; not to weigh in a tradesman’s balance what is permitted and what is forbidden; to be more hostile to pettiness, slyness, and parasitism than to wickedness;—we are in every need of a school where these things would be taught. Such a school would allow its pupils to learn productively, by living and doing; it would not subject them to the tyranny of books and the weight of the past; it would teach them less about the past and more about the future; it would teach them the future of humanity as depending on human will, on their will; it would prepare the way for and be a part of a vast enterprise in breeding and education.[251] But even such a school would not provide all that is necessary in education. Not all should receive the same training and the same care; select groups must be chosen, and special instruction lavished on them; the greatest success, however, will remain for the man who does not seek to educate either everybody or certain limited circles, but only one single individual. The last century was superior to ours precisely because it possessed so many individually educated men.