possessions of the Catholic Church[1]—and this he despises as much as any one. Once he formally distinguishes two kinds of egoism: a sacred one that forces us to serve what is highest in us; another, the egoism of the cat, that wants only its life.[2] Both are preservative—the only question is, of what? The higher kind of selfishness is so contrasted with the lower that he even refuses to call it by this name: "heroism is no selfishness (Eigennutz), for one perishes of it"[3]—this, though he is perfectly aware and expressly says that the higher virtue, so far from being selfless, is that into which one's very self goes.[4] The distinction between the two kinds of selfishness and the two kinds of men is not sentimental or arbitrary. It turns on whether the selfishness represents the advancing or the retrogressive line of life. To quote: "Selfishness is worth as much as the man is worth physiologically who has it; it can have a very high worth, it can have no worth at all and be despicable."[5] Some only want to receive and gather in—the weak, needy, sickly in body and mind; when such people say "all for myself," they are a horror (Grauen) to Nietzsche. But there are others who get and accumulate only to give out again in love: their selfishness, even if it is insatiable in gathering to itself, is sound and holy.[6]
II
And yet what is love? Somewhat daringly and bluntly Nietzsche puts [finds] at the bottom of it a desire to possess. It is not fundamentally different from, is a kind of spiritual form of, the feeling for property or for what we want to make such.[7] Love between the sexes, marriage, is palpably that: each wishes to possess the other, to possess indeed exclusively—here is the basis of jealousy. In very love one may kill, as Don José does Carmen; if he had not loved her, she might have
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 212.
- ↑ Letter to Lou Salomé, quoted by D. Halévy, Vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, p. 25. Cf. the reference to "cats and wolves," Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 2.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 216, § 245.
- ↑ Zarathustra, II, v.
- ↑ Twilight of the Idols, ix, § 33.
- ↑ Zarathustra, I, xxii. The self-love of the sickly and diseased (Süchtigen) "stinkt" (ibid., III, xi, § 2).
- ↑ Werke, XII, 104, § 208.
