The Portable Nietzsche (5 page)

Further, it was in truth from murder and the expiation of murder that the conception of Greek law developed; so, too, the nobler culture takes its first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder. After the wave of that bloody age comes a trough that cuts deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, Musaeus, and their cults reveal the consequences to which the uninterrupted spectacle of a world of struggle and cruelty was pressing: toward a disgust with existence, toward the conception of this existence as a punishment and penance, toward the belief in the identity of existence and guilt. But it is precisely these consequences that are not specifically Hellenic: in this respect, Greece is at one with India and the Orient in general. The Hellenic genius was ready with yet another answer to the question, “What is a life of struggle and victory for?” and it gave that answer through the whole breadth of Greek history.

To understand it, we must start with the point that the Greek genius tolerated the terrible presence of this urge and considered it
justified;
while the Orphic movement contained the idea that a life with such an urge as its root was not worth living. Struggle and the joy of victory were recognized—and nothing distinguishes the Greek world from ours as much as the coloring, so derived, of individual ethical concepts, for example,
Eris
³
and envy. . . .

And not only Aristotle but the whole of Greek antiquity thinks differently from us about hatred and envy, and judges with Hesiod, who in one place calls one Eris evil—namely, the one that leads men into hostile fights of annihilation against one another—while praising another Eris as good—the one that, as jealousy, hatred, and envy, spurs men to activity: not to the activity of fights of annihilation but to the activity of fights which are
contests
. The Greek is envious, and he does not consider this quality a blemish but the gift of a
beneficent
godhead. What a gulf of ethical judgment lies between us and him! . . .

The greater and more sublime a Greek is, the brighter the flame of ambition that flares out of him, consuming everybody who runs on the same course. Aristotle once made a list of such hostile contests in the grand manner; the most striking of the examples is that even a dead man can still spur a live one to consuming jealousy. That is how Aristotle describes the relationship of Xenophanes of Colophon to Homer. We do not understand the full strength of Xenophanes' attack on the national hero of poetry, unless—as again later with Plato—we see that at its root lay an overwhelming craving to assume the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame. Every great Hellene hands on the torch of the contest; every great virtue kindles a new greatness. When the young Themistocles could not sleep because he was thinking of the laurels of Miltiades, his urge, awakened so early, was finally set free in the long contest with Aristides, to become that remarkably unique, purely instinctive genius of his political activity, which Thucydides describes for us. How characteristic are question and answer when a noted opponent of Pericles is asked whether he or Pericles is the best wrestler in the city, and answers: “Even when I throw him down, he denies that he fell and attains his purpose, persuading even those who saw him fall.”

If one wants to observe this conviction—wholly undisguised in its most naïve expression—that the contest is necessary to preserve the health of the state, then one should reflect on the original meaning of
ostracism
, for example, as it is pronounced by the Ephesians when they banish Hermodorus: “Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.” Why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would come to an end and the eternal source of life for the Hellenic state would be endangered. . . . Originally this curious institution is not a safety valve but a means of stimulation: the individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken—an idea that is hostile to the “exclusiveness” of genius in the modern sense and presupposes that in the natural order of things there are always
several
geniuses who spur each other to action, even as they hold each other within the limits of measure. That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a
protection
against the genius, another genius.

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular pedagogy, whereas modern educators dread nothing more than the unleashing of so-called ambition. . . . And just as the youths were educated through contests, their educators were also engaged in contests with each other. The great musical masters, Pindar and Simonides, stood side by side, mistrustful and jealous; in the spirit of contest, the sophist, the advanced teacher of antiquity, meets another sophist; even the most universal type of instruction, through the drama, was meted out to the people only in the form of a tremendous wrestling: among the great musical and dramatic artists. How wonderfull “Even the artist hates the artist.” Whereas: modern man fears nothing in an artist more than the emotion of any personal fight, the Creek knows the artist
only as engaged in a personal fight
. Precisely where modern man senses the weakness of a work of art, the Hellene seeks the source of its greatest strength. What, for example, is of special artistic significance in Plato's dialogues is for the most part the result of a contest with the art of the orators, the sophists, and the dramatists of his time, invented for the purpose of enabling him to say in the end: “Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they. No Protagoras has invented myths as beautiful as mine; no dramatist such a vivid and captivating whole as my
Symposion;
no orator has written orations like those in my
Gorgias
—and now I repudiate all this entirely and condemn all imitative art. Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator.” What a problem opens up before us when we inquire into the relationship of the contest to the conception of the work of art!

However, when we remove the contest from Greek life we immediately look into that pre-Homeric abyss of a terrifying savagery of hatred and the lust to annihilate. This phenomenon unfortunately appears quite frequently when a great personality is suddenly removed from the contest by an extraordinarily brilliant deed and becomes
hors de concours
in his own judgment, as in that of his fellow citizens. The effect is almost without exception a terrifying one; and if one usually infers from this that the Greek was incapable of enduring fame and happiness, one should say more precisely that he was unable to endure fame without any further contest, or the happiness at the end of the contest. There is no clearer example than the last experiences of Miltiades. Placed on a solitary peak and elevated far above every fellow fighter by his incomparable success at Marathon, he feels a base, vengeful craving awaken in him against a Parian citizen with whom he has long had a feud. To satisfy this craving he misuses fame, state property, civic honor—and dishonors himself. . . . An ignominious death sets its seal on his brilliant heroic career and darkens it for all posterity. After the battle of Marathon the envy of the heavenly powers seized him. And this divine envy is inflamed when it beholds a human being without a rival, unopposed, on a solitary peak of fame. Only the gods are beside him now—and therefore they are against him. They seduce him to a deed of
hybris,
⁴
and under it he collapses.

Let us note well that, just as Miltiades perishes, the noblest Greek cities perish too, when through merit and good fortune they arrive at the temple of Nike from the racecourse. Athens, who had destroyed the independence of her allies and then severely punished the rebellions of her subjects; Sparta, who expressed her domination over Hellas after the battle of Aegospotamoi, in yet much harsher and crueler ways, have also, after the example of Miltiades, brought about their own destruction through deeds of
hybris,
as proof that without envy, jealousy, and ambition in the contest, the Hellenic city, like the Hellenic man, degenerates. He becomes evil and cruel; he becomes vengeful and godless; in short, he became “pre-Homeric.” . . .

Deification of success
is truly commensurate with human meanness. Whoever has closely studied even a single success knows what factors (stupidity, wickedness, laziness, etc.) have always helped—and not as the weakest factors either. It is mad that success is supposed to be worth more than the beautiful possibility which was still there immediately before. But to find in history the realization of the good and the just, that is blasphemy against the good and the just. This beautiful world history is, in Heraclitean terms, “a chaotic pile of rubbish.” What is
strong
wins: that is the universal law. If only it were not so often precisely what is stupid and evil!

(VI, 334
f
.)

Hegel
says: “That at the bottom of history, and particularly of world history, there is a final aim, and that this has actually been realized in it and is being realized—the plan of Providence—that there is
reason
in history: that is to be shown philosophically and thus as altogether necessary.” And: “A history without such an aim and without such a point of view would be merely a feeble-minded pastime of the imagination, not even a children's fairy tale, for even children demand some interest in stories, i.e., some aim one can at least feel, and the relation of the occurrences and actions to it.” Conclusion: Every story must have an aim, hence also the history of a people and the history of the world. That means: because there is “world history” there must also be some aim in the world process. That means: we demand stories only with aims. But we do not at all
demand
stories about the world process, for we consider it a swindle to talk about it. That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin; that
I can posit an aim for myself
is another matter. But a state has no aim; we alone give it this aim or that.

(VI, 336)

On the mythology of the historical. Hegel:
“What happens to a people and occurs within it has its essential significance in its relation to the state; the mere particularities of the individuals are most remote from this subject matter of history.” But the state is always only the means for the preservation of many individuals: how could it be the aim? The hope is that with the preservation of so many blanks one may also protect a few in whom humanity culminates. Otherwise it makes no sense at all to preserve so many wretched human beings. The history of the state is the history of the egoism of the masses and of the blind desire to exist; this striving is justified to some extent only in the geniuses, inasmuch as they can thus exist. Individual and collective egoisms struggling against each other —an atomic whirl of egoisms—who would look for aims here?

Through the genius something does result from this atomic whirl after all, and now one forms a milder opinion concerning the senselessness of this procedure —as if a blind hunter fired hundreds of times in vain and finally, by sheer accident, hit a bird. A result at last, he says to himself, and goes on firing.

(vi, 336
f
.)