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NIETZSCHE THE THINKER

is simply that the bowels have become the end for which the body exists. Servants in control, instead of being controlled—this is the gist of the situation, the business as truly as the working classes coming normally under the serving or slave category. Freemen are a different class altogether—they are the higher types already described, whose manner of life the slaves make possible, those for whom the ordered life of society ultimately exists and from whom it normally receives its final direction.

III

In the light of the foregoing, the personal "non-political" attitude of Nietzsche is not so strange. It has little to do with theoretic anarchism. He recognizes the place and function of the state. While originating in force, violence, usurpation, and so of shameful birth, the result of it in time is an ordered social life on a large scale (for families or tribes or village communities are hardly as yet states), and the possibility of a class set free from labor, who can devote themselves to the higher ends of life. This is its justification—the justification even of the conquest and wrong that lie at its basis. "Proudly and calmly the Greek state advances before the judgment seat, and leads by the hand a blooming and glorious figure, Greek society. For this Helen it makes its wars—what gray-bearded judge will dare pass an adverse verdict?"[1] Hence if Nietzsche does not take part in the political life of his time and even intentionally holds aloof from it, it was not for anarchistic reasons. In the first place it should be borne in mind that for all his criticism he was essentially loyal to his fatherland—even to Prussia. He admitted that one who is possessed by the furor philosophicus has no time for the furor politicus, but he added that if one's country is in actual need, one will not hesitate for a moment to take one's post;[2] and he had himself, as we have seen, taken service under Prussia, so far as he could, in the war of 1870. Secondly, he held that the political art is essentially a special art, i.e., one not for everybody, but for those who are specially trained. All are properly subject to the state, but not all should have a hand in steering it. He thought

  1. Werke, IX, 159.
  2. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7