between them may be actually negligible. He notes, for instance, that after some hours of mountain climbing a scamp and a saint are two tolerably similar creatures—exhaustion being the shortest way to equality and brotherhood.[1] He gives also a serious instance. When communities are first organized and all alike are in need of protection from the enemy, men may be considered equal. Even long-established communities manifest equalitarian tendencies, whenever danger arises, such as war or earthquake or flood—differences of rank and privilege being quite lost sight of in face of a common misfortune. But save in these exceptional circumstances, native differences between men, gradations of rank of some sort, tend ever to appear in old and well-established communities; and this also happens whenever social order is broken down and anarchy sets in (cf, what happened at Corcyra, according to the account of Thucydides).[2] The differences really exist all the time, however they may fail to show themselves, and Nietzsche thinks it not truthful or just not to recognize them, and estimate men accordingly. As animal life ranks higher than plant life, and human life ranks above that of the animal, so there is an ascending scale of potencies in human life itself—all men are not on the same level: some are higher, others lower.[3] We in our day are apt to collocate equal with just—"just and equal," we are accustomed to say. But if justice means giving to each his own (suum cuique), and if one person is on one level of life and another on another, then to treat them as if they were on the same level is not justice, but injustice. "Equality to those who are equal, inequality to those who are unequal"—this were the true teaching of justice.[4] "Wrong lies never in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to 'equal rights.'"[5] "The doctrine of equality! … But there is no more poisonous poison; for it appears to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice."[6]
The present-day sentiment in favor of equality become
