Thus Spake Zarathustra - Penn State University

NIETZSCHE AS AN evolutionist I shall have occasion to defineand discuss in the course of these notes (see Noteson Chapter LVI., par.10, and on Chapter LVII.). For thepresent let it suffice for us to know that he accepted the“Development Hypothesis” as an explanation of the originof species: but he did not halt where most naturalistshave halted. He by no means regarded man as the highestpossible being which evolution could arrive at; forthough his physical development may have reached itslimit, this is not the case with his mental or spiritualattributes. If the process be a fact; if things have becomewhat they are, then, he contends, we may describeno limit to man’s aspirations. If he struggled up frombarbarism, and still more remotely from the lower Primates,his ideal should be to surpass man himself andreach Superman (see especially the Prologue).(D.) Nietzsche and SociologyNIETZSCHE AS A SOCIOLOGIST aims at an aristocratic arrange-Friedrich Nietzschement of society. He would have us rear an ideal race.Honest and truthful in intellectual matters, he could noteven think that men are equal. “With these preachers ofequality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thusspeaketh justice unto ME: ‘Men are not equal.’” He seesprecisely in this inequality a purpose to be served, acondition to be exploited. “Every elevation of the type‘man,’” he writes in “Beyond Good and Evil”, “has hithertobeen the work of an aristocratic society—and so willit always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradationsof rank and differences of worth among humanbeings.”Those who are sufficiently interested to desire to readhis own detailed account of the society he would fainestablish, will find an excellent passage in Aphorism 57of The Antichrist.jPART I. THE PROLOGUE297