I may add that the difficulty is also lessened, if, without varying the essential thought, we resort to slightly different language. Nietzsche speaks of "the social type" and the "solitary type" as "both necessary";[1] and "necessary" can only mean essential to a whole of which both are parts. We may quarrel with him for speaking of solitary individuals as a social class, may find it a contradictio in adjecto; but it may also be that the surface contradiction takes us straight into his deeper meaning. For the solitary individuals are still human: nay, to Nietzsche, they are the crown and culmination of humanity. Yet if so, society and humanity are not exactly co-extensive conceptions—there may be an unsocial type of humanity, i.e., society is only a particular form of humanity, not its substance. aa Well, this was just what Nietzsche held—and Professor Simmel, with his customary acuteness and profound grasp of whatever subject he takes up, has particularly noted it.[2] Society is the "redeemed form" of the lower man, but the higher man is, in one aspect of his being, beyond it—he makes and is his own law, he is not a part or function, but a whole by himself. bb The great individual is humanity itself at its topmost reach. In one way, every individual may be regarded as humanity, i.e., not merely as an atom, one of a chain, but as the whole stock and process back of him as it constitutes itself at a given moment (as Nietzsche puts it, as "the whole chain," "the whole line of man up to himself"); but the higher individual is humanity risen to a new level, the total life "takes a step further with him "—and it is a secondary matter whether others, society, profit by him or lose.[3] When, then, Nietzsche says that both types, the social and solitary, are necessary, we may say that he means necessary to humanity, not society—or if to society, then so far as the rarer, higher type is needed to give a final justification to society. cc
The two types, as stated, fit together and yet they are very different and they fit together just because they are different.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 886.
- ↑ Op. cit., pp. 206-11; Simmel thinks that Goethe made (in effect) similar distinctions.
- ↑ I am not sure whether I get Nietzsche's exact shade of meaning here—let the student consult the passages, Will to Power, § 687 (cf. §§ 682, 678, 785); Twilight etc., ix, § 33; also Simmel's exposition, just cited.
