dictable, that one aime la grandeur et l'imprévu."[1] But there is little vigor in the social body. Indeed, there Scarcely is a social body, but rather a conglomerate of egoistic individuals, who tolerate one another and on occasion help one another and have too much sensibility and pity to do what the health of the social organism really requires. For there are unsound elements in society today, inappropriable, useless individuals, refuse, and society should slough them off (Nietzsche uses the word "excrete"). The vicious, the criminal, the insane, the anarchists come under this head. Nietzsche is satirical toward tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.[2] He regards the demand for the abolition of punishment as diseased mellowness and effeminacy—sometimes weak nerves more than anything else.[3] The brutal, the canaille, and the cattle should be strictly controlled—or else removed.[4] As one cannot carry the law of altruism into physiology and put hopelessly diseased parts of the organism on a par with sound ones, so with the social body. Nature is not to be set down as unmoral for showing no pity to what is degenerate, and it is a sickly and unnatural morality which has brought about the accumulation of physiological and moral evils which we witness in society today.[5] All of which is to say that modern society is not properly a "society," a "body" at all—being without the normal instincts of one.[6]
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 208, § 417.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 81.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 201; Werke, XIII, 199, § 438. Cf., as to mildness to crime and stupidity, Will to Power, § 130; as to the anarchist attitude to punitive justice. Beyond Good and Evil, § 202. For all this, Nietzsche gives no sanction to the spirit of revenge and does not really unsay what he had said about punishment before.
- ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 237-8.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 52; cf. Ecce Homo, III, v, § 2.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 50.
