Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Chapter LVII.). For the present let it suffice for us to know that he
265 words | Chapter 4
accepted the “Development Hypothesis” as an explanation of the origin of
species: but he did not halt where most naturalists have halted. He
by no means regarded man as the highest possible being which evolution
could arrive at; for though his physical development may have reached
its limit, this is not the case with his mental or spiritual attributes.
If the process be a fact; if things have BECOME what they are, then, he
contends, we may describe no limit to man’s aspirations. If he struggled
up from barbarism, and still more remotely from the lower Primates,
his ideal should be to surpass man himself and reach Superman (see
especially the Prologue).
(D.) Nietzsche and Sociology.
Nietzsche as a sociologist aims at an aristocratic arrangement of
society. He would have us rear an ideal race. Honest and truthful in
intellectual matters, he could not even think that men are equal. “With
these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For
thus speaketh justice unto ME: ‘Men are not equal.’” He sees precisely
in this inequality a purpose to be served, a condition to be exploited.
“Every elevation of the type ‘man,’” he writes in “Beyond Good and
Evil”, “has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society—and so
will it always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of
rank and differences of worth among human beings.”
Those who are sufficiently interested to desire to read his own detailed
account of the society he would fain establish, will find an excellent
passage in Aphorism 57 of “The Antichrist”.
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