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The latter could speak of a slave as an "animated tool," and could believe there were men intended by nature for slavery. Kant could not. In theory an individualist, the Sage of Konigsberg stands, in reality, not far from Hegel. He does not break with the past. But Nietzsche is revolt incarnate.
His last book, “Ecce Homo,” an autobiography, contains all the premonitory symptoms of the threatening tragedy. Alas! fatality was soon to shatter the wise and clever man who wrote those excellent books. In 1889 Nietzsche went mad. For eleven years he lingered on in private institutions and in the house of his old mother at Naumburg.
But he who has the courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers of a fine life. For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part. The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete.
For the secret of life is to take every risk without fear; even the risk of finding one's self an exile, with "no shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming" in the land without memories, without altars, without Thee! It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. The dissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling.
The tyranny of the diatonic and chromatic scales, the tiresome revolutions of the major and minor modes, the critical Canutes who sit at the seaside and say to the modern waves: Thus far and no farther; and then hastily abandon their chairs and rush to safety else be overwhelmed, all these things are of the past, whether in music, art, literature, and let Nietzsche speak in ethics.
Here we have a description of the kind of altruism Nietzsche exacted from higher men. Par. 6. This refers, of course, to the reception pioneers of Nietzsche's stamp meet with at the hands of their contemporaries. Par. 8. Nietzsche teaches that nothing is stable, not even values, not even the concepts good and evil. He likens life unto a stream.
They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in nothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical and complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly religion of the gospel. "I see a vision," Nietzsche says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet so wonderfully strange Cæsar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?
He has a sense of humour and perceives that human nature lacks much that we could wish it possessed. He feels rightly toward literature, too, and reads desirable authors. He is a good European and is the only man I know, save Poggi, who understands Nietzsche. All this is in his favor; and yet even Jenny appears to regard Giuseppe as wholly ineffectual.
I am convinced that beneath and beyond the Montaigne of convention and tradition there is another much bigger and much deeper Montaigne, whose identity would have staggered his contemporaries, and would have landed him in prison. And it is this unconventional and real Montaigne who is the spiritual father of Nietzsche.
I have left the world as a sultan leaves rich food and harems and flowers, and clothes himself in a hair shirt. Really, I could make quite a song and dance about it. For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot. Nietzsche no doubt would have spoken thus: The last word I spake unto men achieved their praise, and they nodded. But it was my last word; and I went into the forest.
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