Nietzsche's Early Metaphysics. (First published 2010/03/05.)

The fundamental concept of Nietzsche's early metaphysics is the primordial One. "One" is here a nominalised adjective and is neuter. It may be relevant to note that originally, the word "god", too, was neuter. The primordial One is the "God" of Nietzsche's early metaphysics. One should remember at all times though that It is immanent, not transcendent.

The primordial One has Being (as opposed to "Becoming") and suffers from it. This suffering is a suffering from over-fulness, over-joyedness: the primordial One aches for lack and woe. It therefore imagines a world of Becoming, lack, and woe. This imagined world, this vision, is not outside It, but It is immanent to it: it is the world as we know it---the world we are a part of. The world as we know it is an imaginary self-fragmentation of the primordial One; we are really only imaginary fragments, and only have reality in being one with the primordial One.

This world of Becoming, lack, and woe, which Nietzsche usually calls "Nature" (and which he personifies, hence the capital N), itself also aches for something. Contrary to the primordial One, Whose ache's alleviation it is, it aches for Being, fulness, and joy. And this ache is again alleviated by imagination: by Apollinian illusion. This illusion is not only the alleviation of Nature, but also the complete redemption of the primordial One. For the primordial One delights in seeing Its "creatures" (most notably human beings) at ease in the illusion of Being. This happiness of Nature/Becoming in the illusion of Being transfigures the primordial One's own Being: Being now seems something desirable, indeed, the highest good. What delusion! This identication of the good, the beautiful, and the true in Being is the furthest away from the truth and therefore the most desirable. This illusion is truly the highest good and the most beautiful beloved. But only for the primordial One. For us, it is beautiful and good, but only as a relief from Becoming, not as a transfiguration of Being. In order to partake in the delight of this transfiguration, we must put ourselves in the place of the primordial One.

The highest form of the illusion of Being in the midst of Becoming is attained by the Apollinian genius. It is for the sake of this genius that the State exists. All human organisations larger than the family ultimately exist solely for this purpose, and even the family ultimately derives its worth solely from compensating for any deficiencies the State may have (hence in Plato's perfect State, the family was to cease: for it would no longer have been of any use).

But there is also another kind of genius, and this has in itself nothing to do with the State. It is the Dionysian genius. The genius of the Dionysian genius consists in his being able to put himself in the place of the primordial One. The supreme achievement of the exclusively Dionysian genius is experiencing the world as we know it as the primordial One experiences it: as an alleviation of the torment of Being, overfulness, and overjoyedness in the illusion of Becoming, lack, and woe. But this achievement is not the supreme human achievement. The supreme human achievement is the supreme achievement of the both Dionysian and Apolllinian genius. This genius can at the same time put himself in the place of the primordial One and create Apollinian images.

[N]ow Apollo approaches him and touches him with his laurel. The sleeper's enchantment through Dionysian music now begins to emit sparks of imagery, poems which, at their point of highest evolution, will bear the name of tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs." [Source: Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 5.]

[O]nly in the work of art that is the tragedy do we hear that highest twin art which, in its union of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, is the image [Abbild] of that primordial enjoyment of the eye of the world. [Source: Nietzsche, fragment of an advanced form of The Birth of Tragedy.]

This is a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Nietzsche's early essay, 'The Greek State'. In order to completely understand this essay, I think one must have practical knowledge of Nietzsche's early metaphysics.


The fourteen paragraphs.


1.

We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word "slave": we talk of the "dignity of man" and of the "dignity of labour." Everybody worries in order to miserably perpetuate a miserable existence; this awful need compels man to consuming labour; he (or, more exactly, the human intellect), seduced by the "will", now occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified. However, in order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour, it would be necessary above all, that existence itself, to which labour after all is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had, up to the present, to serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks!

The word "advantage" is misleading: Nietzsche rather says that we moderns have two ideas which the Greeks had not. That this is not an advantage is made clear by the word "compensation", which in the German is Trostmittel, literally "means [or even remedies] of consolation". This "compensation" is necessary because we moderns do not only behave thoroughly slavishly, but we seek to evade the word, and the idea, "slave". The 'dignity of labour', then, is a euphemism for the necessity of slavery: we need to work, like draught animals, in order to perpetuate our existence. And not only is the means of perpetuation, labour, miserable according to Nietzsche; that which is perpetuated, our existence, is itself miserable. And against the miserability of our existence we need another illusion, another "compensation": the idea that a human being, the existence of a human being, is in itself dignified...


2.

Out of this awful struggle for existence only individuals can emerge, and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture, lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern world, which, compared with the Greek, usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs, in which the individual, like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled together out of pieces, here in the modern world often in one and the same man the greed [Gier] of the struggle for existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time: out of this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma, to excuse and to consecrate that first greed before this need for art. Therefore we believe in the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour'.

Only individuals can emerge because each is concerned solely with his own survival. But in order to endure this soleness of concern, one needs the "noble phantoms of artistic culture", that is: one paradoxically has a second concern, which is to deceive (oneself, primarily) about the character of one's first concern. This duality of concern makes one "like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the Horatian Art of Poetry":

"If a painter should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight?"
(Horace, The Art of Poetry, 1-5.)

The "ugly fish below" must be excused and consecrated before the "beautiful woman in the upper part". To this end it is necessary to believe in the dignity of the ugly fish below (labour) and the dignity of the whole fabulous creature (the man who is such an "unnatural amalgamation" of woman and fish, that is, of the need for art and the "greed of the struggle for existence", respectively).


3-5.

The Greeks did not require such conceptual hallucinations, for among them the idea that labour is a disgrace is expressed with startling frankness; and another piece of wisdom, more hidden and less articulate, but everywhere alive, added that the human thing also was an ignominious and piteous nothing and the "dream of a shadow" [Pindar, Pythia 8, 95]. Labour is a disgrace, because existence has no value in itself; when however this very existence shines forth in the alluring embellishment of artistic illusions and really does seem to have a value in itself, even then that proposition is still valid that labour is a disgrace---namely in the feeling that it is impossible for the man who fights for the continuance of bare existence to become an artist. In modern times it is not the art-needing man but the slave who determines the general conceptions, the slave who according to his nature must give deceptive names to all conditions in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woeful time, in which the slave requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to think about and beyond himself! Cursed seducers, who have destroyed the slave's state of innocence by the fruit of the tree of knowledge! Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged 'equal rights of all' or the so-called 'fundamental rights of man', of man as such, or the 'dignity of labour'. Indeed he is not to understand at what stage and at what height dignity can first be mentioned, namely at the point where the individual goes wholly beyond himself and no longer has to work and to produce in order to preserve his individual existence.And even on this height of 'labour' the Greek at times is overcome by a feeling that looks like shame. In one place Plutarch [Pericles, 2] says with classical Greek instinct that no nobly born youth, on beholding the Zeus in Pisa, would have the desire to become himself a Phidias, or on seeing the Hera in Argos, to become himself a Polyklet; and just as little would he wish to be Anacreon, Philetas, or Archilochus, however much he might revel in their poetry. To the Greek the work of the artist falls just as much under the undignified conception of labour as any ignoble craft. But when the compelling force of the artistic impulse operates in him, then he must produce, and submit himself to that need of labour. And as a father admires the beauty and the gift of his child, but thinks of the act of procreation with shamefaced dislike, so it was with the Greek. The joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded him as to its origin [Werden, "Becoming"], which appeared to him, like all "Becoming" [Werden] in nature, to be a powerful necessity, a forcing of itself into existence. That feeling by which the process of procreation is considered as something shamefacedly to be hidden, although by it man serves a higher purpose than his individual preservation, that same feeling veiled also the origin [Entstehung] of the great works of art, in spite of the fact that through them a higher form of existence is inaugurated, just as through that other act comes a new generation. The feeling of shame seems therefore to occur where man is merely a tool of manifestations of the will which are infinitely greater than he is permitted to consider himself, in the isolated shape of the individual.Now we have the general idea to which the feelings are to be subordinated which the Greek had with regard to labour and slavery. Both were considered by them as a necessary disgrace, of which one feels ashamed, as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same time. In this feeling of shame is hidden the unconscious discernment that the real aim needs those conditional factors, but that in that need lies the fearful and beast-of-prey-like quality of the sphinx called Nature, who in the glorification of the artistically free culture-life so beautifully stretches forth her virgin-body. Culture, which is chiefly a genuine need for art, rests upon a terrible basis: the latter however makes itself known in the twilight sensation of shame. In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. At their expense, through the surplus of their labour, that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want.

The shame mentioned in the above translation of paragraphs 3-5 is aidôs---e.g., in the example of the act of procreation, aidôs before the power of 'Aphrodite' (cf. Euripides' Hippolytos). What did the Greeks consider a disgrace, what gave the Greeks a sense of shame, according to Nietzsche? The key lies in the following passage:

"This feeling of shame contains the unconscious perception that the actual aim needs [bedarf] those presuppositions, that however in that need [Bedürfniss] lies the horrible and beast-of-prey-like quality of the sphinx called Nature who in the glorification of the artistically free culture-life so beautifully stretches forth her damsel's-body."
(paragraph 5.)

More precisely, the key lies in the phrase "artistically free culture-life". For what the Greeks considered a disgrace, what gave the Greeks a sense of shame, was unfreedom (or, as the instinct of freedom is the will to power (GM II 18), impotence). The slave was not free not to toil for his survival; the artist was not free not to act on his 'inspiration'. Only freedom confers dignity---or, as Nietzsche implies later, labour in the service of freedom:

"[E]very human being, with his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is a means of the genius, consciously or unconsciously[.]"
(paragraph 13.)

But how is the genius (i.e., in this context, the Apollinian genius) free? Free from the (semi-)Schopenhauerian 'will'? The answer is: "Only apparently; not actually":

"What is the beautiful?---a pleasure-experience, which hides from us the actual aims that the will has in an appearance [die der Wille in einer Erscheinung hat]. By what, then, is the pleasure-experience aroused? Objectively: the beautiful is a smiling of Nature, an excess of force and of pleasure-feeling of existence: one should think of plants. It is the damsel's-body of the Sphinx. The aim of the beautiful is Seducing-to-existence. Now, what is actually that smiling, that seductiveness? Negatively: the concealing of need [Not], the smoothing-away of all folds and the cheerful soul-glance of the thing.
"See Helena in every woman" the lust for existence conceals the unbeautiful. Negation of need [Not], either true or seeming negation of need is the beautiful. The sound of one's native tongue in a strange land is beautiful. Even the worst piece of music can be experienced as beautiful in comparison with adverse howling, whereas it is experienced as ugly compared to other pieces of music. So it is with the beauty of plants etc. as well. The need [Bedürfniss] for the negation of need [Not] and the semblance of such a negation must meet halfway.
Of what, then, does this semblance consist? Impetuousness, lust, crowding, and distorted stretching-out are not permitted to be noticeable. The actual question is: how is this possible? Considering the terrifying nature of the will? Only by means of an image [Vorstellung], subjectively: by means of a phantom [Wahngebilde, literally "delusional image"] that is shoved in between, which gives the pretense of the success of the lustful world-will; the beautiful is a blissful dream on the countenance of a being whose features now smile in hope. With this dream, this anticipation in his head does Faust see "Helena" in every woman. Thus we find that the individual will also can dream, can anticipate, has images and fantasies [Vorstellungen und Phantasiebilder]. The aim of Nature in this beautiful smiling of that will's appearances is the seduction of other individuals to existence. The plant is the beautiful world of the animal, the whole world that of man, the genius the beautiful world of the primordial will itself. The creations of art are the highest pleasure-goal of the will.
Every Greek statue can teach us that the beautiful is only negation.---The highest enjoyment does the will have at the Dionysian tragedy, because here even the terrifying face of existence stimulates to living-on---by means of ecstatic excitations."
(Nietzsche, Nachlass End 1870-April 1871 7 [27], entire. Cf. WP 799 (1888).)

Note that the word translated as "lust" above, Gier, does not (necessarily) mean sexual lust, but rather hunger, voraciousness, etc.

The---Apollinian---genius is the beautiful world of the primordial will; his artistic creations are the supreme pleasure-goal of that will. The primordial will, the Primordial One Itself, then, is successfully deluded by such genius. And if even the Primordial One is deluded, what relevant distinction can there then be left between this delusion and the truth? For this reason, the seeming freedom of the Apollinian genius confers actual dignity on all who work in his service.---


6.

Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth, that slavery is of the essence of culture, a truth of course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of existence. This truth is the vulture that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of culture. The misery of toiling men must still increase in order to make the production of the world of art possible to a small number of Olympian men. Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath nourished by Communists and Socialists of all times, and also by their feebler descendants, the white race of the 'Liberals', not only against the arts, but also against classical antiquity. If culture really rested upon the will of a people, if here inexorable powers did not rule, powers which are law and barrier to the individual, then the contempt for culture, the glorification of a 'poorness in spirit', the iconoclastic annihilation of artistic claims would be more than an insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-like individuals; it would be the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of culture; the desire for justice, for the equalization of suffering, would swamp all other ideas. In fact here and there sometimes an exuberant degree of compassion has for a short time opened all the floodgates of culture-life; a rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared with the first radiant rise of Christianity and under it was born Christianity's most beautiful fruit, the Gospel according to St. John. But there are also instances to show that powerful religions for long periods petrify a given degree of culture, and cut off with inexorable sickle everything that still grows on strongly and luxuriantly. For it is not to be forgotten that the same cruelty, which we found in the essence of every culture, lies also in the essence of every powerful religion and in general in the essence of power, which is always evil; so that we shall understand it just as well when a culture is shattering, with a cry for liberty or at least justice, a too highly piled bulwark of religious claims. That which in this 'sorry scheme' of things will live, i.e., must live, is at the bottom of its nature a reflex of the primal pain and primal contradiction, and must therefore strike our eyes---"an organ fashioned for this world and earth" [Goethe, Faust II, 11906]---as an insatiable greed for existence and an eternal self-contradiction, within the form of time, therefore as Becoming. Every moment devours the preceding one, every birth is the death of innumerable beings; begetting, living, murdering, all is one. Therefore we may compare this grand culture with a blood-stained victor, who in his triumphal procession carries the defeated along as slaves chained to his chariot, slaves whom a beneficent power has so blinded that, almost crushed by the wheels of the chariot, they nevertheless still exclaim: "Dignity of labour!" "Dignity of Man!" The voluptuous Cleopatra called Culture throws ever again the most priceless pearls, the tears of compassion for the misery of slaves, into her golden goblet. Out of the emasculation of modern man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time, not out of the true and deep commiseration for that misery; and if it should be true that the Greeks perished from their slavedom, then another fact is much more certain, that we shall perish from the lack of slavedom. Slavedom did not appear in any way objectionable, much less abominable, either to early Christianity or to the Germanic race. What an uplifting effect has the contemplation of the medieval bondman on us, with his legal and moral relations---relations that were inwardly strong and tender---towards the man of higher rank, with the profound fencing-in of his narrow existence---how uplifting!---and how reproachful!

In plain language: Culture cannot exist without slavery. This is a problem. Indeed, "[[/color][color=#000000]i]f culture really rested upon the will of a people, if here inexorable powers did not rule, powers which are law and barrier to the individual, then" there would be no more culture. So the possibility of culture depends on slavery, and the possibility of slavery depends upon mysterious "powers". One of these powers is the "beneficent power" that blinds slaves so that, "almost crushed by the wheels of the chariot, they nevertheless still exclaim: "Dignity of labour!" "Dignity of Man!"". We shall see whence these powers originate later.

In conclusion of this section I wish to attend you on what Nietzsche says next:

"The voluptuous Cleopatra called Culture throws ever again the most priceless pearls, the tears of compassion for the misery of slaves, into her golden goblet. Out of the emasculation of modern man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time, not out of the true and deep commiseration for that misery; and if it should be true that the Greeks perished from their slavedom, then another fact is much more certain, that we shall perish from the lack of slavedom."

That is to say: A true culture has true and deep commiseration for the misery of slaves, but this does not prevent it from seeing their slavedom as necessary, from keeping them enslaved and subjected and exploiting them. Thus such commiseration does not need to cause "enormous social distress" like that of Nietzsche's time (and perhaps of our time as well?); it is the emasculation of man that causes such distress, the fact that modern man is too weak to endure the sight of the suffering of many.


7-9.

He who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs [Configuration] in society without melancholy, who has learnt to conceive of it as the continual painful birth of those privileged culture-men in whose service everything else must be devoured---he will no longer be deceived by that false glamour which the moderns have spread over the origin and meaning of the state. For what can the state mean to us, if not the means by which that social process described just now is to be brought into flux and to be guaranteed in its unimpeded continuance. Be the sociable instinct [Trieb, "drive"] in individual man as strong as it may, it is only the iron clamp of the state that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a fashion that that chemical decomposition of society, with its pyramid-like superstructure, is  bound to take place. Whence however originates this sudden power of the state, whose aim lies much beyond the insight and beyond the egoism of the individual? How did the slave, the blind mole of culture, originate? The Greeks in their instinct [Instinkt] relating to the law of nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct which even in the ripest fullness of their civilization and humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as: "To the victor belongs the vanquished, with wife and child, life and property. Power gives the first right, and there is no right, which at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence."Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility nature, in order to arrive at society, forges for herself the cruel tool of the state---namely, that conqueror with the iron hand, who is nothing else than the objectification of the instinct [Instinkt] indicated. By the indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors the spectator feels that they are only the means of an intention manifesting itself through them and yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them.Now when we see how little the vanquished trouble themselves after a short time about the horrible origin of the state, so that history informs us of no class of events worse than the origins of those sudden, violent, bloody and, at least in one point, inexplicable usurpations: when hearts involuntarily go out towards the magic of the growing [werdend] state with the presentiment of an invisibly deep purpose, where the calculating intellect is only able to see an addition of forces; when now the state is even contemplated with fervour as the goal and ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the individual: then out of all that speaks the enormous necessity of the state, without which nature might not succeed in coming, through society, to her deliverance in appearance, in the mirror of the genius. What discernments does the instinctive pleasure in the state not overcome! One would indeed feel inclined to think that a man who looks into the origin of the state will henceforth seek his salvation at an awful distance from it; and where can one not see the monuments of its origin [Entstehung]---devastated lands, destroyed cities, brutalized men, devouring hatred of nations! The state, of ignominiously low birth, for the majority of men a continually flowing source of hardship, at frequently recurring periods the consuming torch of mankind---and yet a word, at which we forget ourselves, a battle cry, which has inspired men to innumerable really heroic deeds, perhaps the highest and most venerable object for the blind and egoistic multitude which only in the tremendous moments of state-life has the strange expression of greatness on its face!

Summary:

7) The position of affairs in society is the continual painful birth of privileged culture-men in whose service everything else must be devoured. The state is the means by which the painful birth of these culture-men is to be made, and kept, continual. Only the state can bring that position of affairs, in which the many toil in the service of these privileged few, about. This it brings about by conquest.

8) In order to make the state conquer, nature creates the conqueror with the iron hand, whose greatness and power are indefinable. This greatness and power suggests that such conquerors are only the means to a higher end (Absicht, "purpose", translated above as "intention"). This suggestion of a higher purpose is the "magic will" that seems to emanate from them: because of this suggestion, "[t]he weaker forces attach themselves to them with [...] mysterious speed, and transform themselves [...] wonderfully, [...] into an affinity hitherto not existing".

9) Out of all this "speaks the enormous necessity of the state, without which nature might not succeed in coming, through society, to her deliverance in appearance, in the mirror of the genius."---This is where the end to which the great conqueror is a means, said higher purpose, the aim of the state, is first mentioned. Nature's secret end, to which the conqueror, the state, and society are all just means, is to come "to her deliverance in appearance, in the mirror of the genius"...


10-11.

We have, however, to consider the Greeks, with regard to the unique sun-height of their art, as the 'political men in themselves'; and certainly history knows of no second instance of such an awful unleashing of the political passion, such an unconditional immolation of all other interests in the service of this state-instinct. At the best one might distinguish the men of the Renaissance in Italy with a similar title for like reasons and by way of comparison. So overloaded is that passion among the Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This bloody jealousy of city against city, of party against party, this murderous greed [Gier] of those little wars, the tiger-like triumph over the corpse of the slain enemy, in short, the incessant renewal of those Trojan scenes of struggle and horror, in the spectacle of which Homer, as a genuine Hellene, stands before us absorbed with delight---whither does this naive barbarism of the Greek state point? What is its excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice? Proud and calm the state steps before this tribunal, and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming womanhood: Greek society. For this Helena the state waged those wars---and what gray-bearded judge could here condemn?---Under this mysterious connection which we here divine between state and art, political greed and artistic creation, battlefield and work of art, we understand by the state, as already remarked, only the cramp-iron which compels the social process; whereas without the state, in the natural bellum omnium contra omnes ["war of all against all"] society cannot strike root at all on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family. Now, after states have been established almost everywhere, that bent of the bellum omnium contra omnes concentrates itself from time to time into a terrible war-cloud of peoples and discharges itself as it were in rare but so much the more violent shocks and lightning flashes. But society is given time during the intervals, in consequence of the inward-turned and compressed effect of that bellum, to germinate and burst into leaf, in order, as soon as warmer days come, to let the shining blossoms of genius sprout forth.

The gist here is that, where there are multiple states (or cities: Greek poleis), states tend to wage war among one another from time to time, but when they are not at war, they tend to turn their energies inward, to conflicts between factions, for instance, or---and this is what Nietzsche alludes to here---to contests between individuals, like those competitions in which both Aeschylus and Sophocles took part. It was their mutual jealousy, their urge to excell, which drove Aeschylus and Sophocles to surpass themselves and write those plays with which their names will forever be associated.


12.

In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I will not conceal in which phenomena of the present I believe to discern dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society. If there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed outside the national- and state-instincts, who consequently have to accept the state only insofar as they conceive that it coincides with their own interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of large political communities possible, in which they might be permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction. With this idea in their heads they will promote that policy which will offer the greatest security to these purposes; whereas it is unthinkable that they, against their intentions [Absichten], guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct, should sacrifice themselves for the state-tendency, unthinkable because they lack that very instinct. All other citizens of the state are in the dark about what nature intends with her state-instinct within them, and they follow blindly; only those who stand outside this instinct know what they want from the state and what the state is to grant them. Therefore it is almost unavoidable that such men should gain great influence on the state, because they are allowed to consider it as a means, whereas all the others, being under the sway of those unconscious purposes of the state, are themselves only means for the fulfillment of the state-purpose. In order now to attain, through the medium of the state, the highest furtherance of their selfish aims, it is above all necessary that the state be wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions, so that it may be used rationally; and thereby they strive as consciously as possible for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility. For that purpose the first thing to do is to curtail and to enfeeble the political separatisms and factions and through the establishment of large equipoised state-bodies, and the mutual safeguarding thereof, to make the successful result of an aggressive war, and consequently war itself, the greatest improbability; as on the other hand they will endeavour to wrest the question of war and peace from the decision of individual rulers, in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism of the masses or their representatives; for which purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the monarchic instincts of the nations [Völker, "peoples"]. This purpose they attain best through the most general promulgation of the liberal-optimistic view of the world, which has its roots in the doctrines of the French Enlightenment and the [French] Revolution, i.e., in a wholly un-Germanic [ungermanisch, adj.], truly Romanically  [romanisch, adv.] shallow and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help seeing in the prevailing international movements of the present day, and the simultaneous promulgation of universal suffrage, the effects of the fear of war above all else, yea I behold behind these movements, as the really alarmed, those truly international homeless money-hermits, who, with their natural lack of the state-instinct, have learned to abuse politics as a means of the Exchange, and state and society as an apparatus for their own enrichment. Against the deviation of the state-tendency into a money-tendency, to be feared from this side, the only remedy is war and once again war: in the excitations of which this at least becomes clear, that the state is not founded upon the fear of the war-demon, as a protective institution for egoistic individuals, but that in the love of fatherland and prince, it produces an ethical impulse, indicative of a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as a dangerous characteristic of the present political situation the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish stateless money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern financial affairs fallen into strange hands, and imagine all evils of social conditions, together with the necessary decay of the arts, to have either germinated from that root or grown together with it, one will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a paean on war. Horribly clangs its silvery bow; and although it comes along like the night, war is nevertheless Apollo, the right god for consecrating and purifying the state. First of all, however, as is said in the beginning of the Iliad, he lets his arrow fly on the mules and dogs [Iliad  I, 47-52]. Then he strikes the men themselves, and everywhere funeral pyres blaze. Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a necessity for the state as the slave is for society; and who can avoid these insights if he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never-equaled Greek art-perfection?

For those readers to whom it is not yet entirely clear who Nietzsche means by "those truly international homeless money-hermits", I will translate and quote a passage from a letter of Nietzsche's from the same period ('The Greek State' was dedicated to Cosima Wagner at Christmas 1872):

"]I]f at least one thing from that wild war-game may remain at peace [i.e., unchanged] for us, then it must be the heroic and at the same time sober-minded spirit, which to my surprise, as a beautiful unexpected discovery, I found fresh and vigorous, in old Germanic [germanisch] health, within our army. That is something one can build on: we are allowed to hope again! Our German [deutsch] mission is not over yet! I am more courageous than ever: for everything has not yet perished under French-Jewish shallowness and 'elegance' and under the greedy goings of the 'present time'. There is still bravery: namely, German bravery, which is something intrinsically different from the élan of our pitiable neighbours."
[Letter to Gersdorff, 21 June 1871.]

Here Frenchness is conjoined together with Jewishness, and this "French-Jewishness" in turn is connected with greed.


13.

I will do this one in parts.

He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility, the soldiers' profession, with respect to the hitherto described nature of the state, must arrive at the insight that through war and in the soldiers' profession is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps the prototype of the state.

This word, "prototype" (Urbild), is significant, because Nietzsche uses the same word in The Birth of Tragedy, to wit in this context:

"For the Greek the satyr expressed nature in a rude, uncultivated state: he did not, for that reason, confound him with the monkey. Quite the contrary, the satyr was man's true prototype, an expression of his highest and strongest aspirations."
(BT 8.)

Is here perhaps placed before our eyes the state's true prototype, an expression of its highest and strongest aspirations?---

Here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes, out of which rises pyramid-shaped, on an exceedingly broad bottom layer of slaves, the edifice of the 'martial society'.

Should this 'martial society' be to civil society as the satyr is to man? The satyr is the natural man; so is the martial society perhaps the natural society?---But wait. The satyr was the natural man as the Greek, that is, the truly Classical man imagined him. So the martial society Nietzsche mentions is at best to Classical society as the satyr is to Classical man. 'We' moderns have an altogether different view of the natural man...

"The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of later times have both been products of a desire for naturalness and simplicity. But how firmly the Greek shaped his wood sprite, and how self-consciously and mawkishly the modern dallies with his tender, fluting shepherd!"
(again BT 8.)

Perhaps modern man is to this tender, fluting shepherd as modern society is to the 'ideal' society---that is, the Communist society... A society with no state! A world without war! That this would also be a world without greatness is rather not contemplated.

The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke, and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities, until they are brought into affinity with that purpose. In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the military genius---with whom we have become acquainted as the original founder of states.

This is a reference to an earlier paragraph, paragraph 8:

"Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility nature, in order to arrive at society, forges for herself the cruel tool of the state---namely, that conqueror with the iron hand".

I summarised this paragraph as follows:

In order to make the state conquer [which is necessary in order to make many toil in the service of a privileged few], nature creates the conqueror with the iron hand, whose greatness and power are indefinable. This greatness and power suggests that such conquerors are only the means to a higher end [...].

But here, in paragraph 13, Nietzsche says that this conqueror is the military genius, who is "what in this internal process is involved at the bottom". And he continues:

In the case of many states, for example in the Lycurgian constitution of Sparta, one can clearly see the impress of that fundamental idea of the state, that of the creation of the military genius.

The creation of the military genius is the fundamental idea of the state... This is the purpose we have been looking for. And this means that it is in the mirror of this genius that nature comes to her "deliverance in appearance".

If we now imagine the military proto-state in its most lively activity, at its proper 'labour', and fix our glance upon the whole technique of war, we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked up from everywhere, as to the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour', by the question whether the idea of dignity is applicable also to that labour which has as its purpose the destruction of the 'dignified' man, as well as to the man who is entrusted with that 'dignified labour', or whether in this warlike task of the state those ideas, being mutually contradictory, do not neutralize one another. I should think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius, and his labour again only a means of that same genius; and not to him as absolute man and non-genius, but to him as a means of the genius---the latter who can also choose the former's destruction, as a means to the martial work of art---is due a degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius. But what is shown here in a single instance is valid in the most general sense: every human being, with his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is a means of the genius, consciously or unconsciously; and from this we can immediately draw the ethical conclusion, that 'man in himself', the absolute man, possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties: only as a wholly determined being serving unconscious purposes can man excuse his existence.

Here we find two ideas, which together will allow us to complete our task, even though there is one more paragraph. The first idea is that the military genius creates a "martial work of art". This martial work of art, then, must be the great artistic mirror image of nature, in which she appears transfigured.

The second idea is that "every human being, with his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is a means of the genius, consciously or unconsciously". This, then, must also apply to the (military) genius. The genius himself must be a means of the genius. This the military genius accomplishes by being the means by which the creation of the military genius is alone possible:

"Here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes, out of which rises pyramid-shaped, on an exceedingly broad bottom layer of slaves, the edifice of the 'martial society'. The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke, and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities, until they are brought into affinity with that purpose."

This same process is described in paragraph 8:

"Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility nature, in order to arrive at society, forges for herself the cruel tool of the state---namely, that conqueror with the iron hand, who is nothing else than the objectification of the instinct indicated. By the indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors the spectator feels that they are only the means of an intention manifesting itself through them and yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them."

And this "intention manifesting itself through them" is in turn described in paragraph 13:

"In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the military genius---with whom we have become acquainted as the original founder of states. In the case of many states, for example in the Lycurgian constitution of Sparta, one can clearly see the impress of that fundamental idea of the state, that of the creation of the military genius."

The creation of the military genius is the intention that manifests itself through the military genius---and which attracts all the weaker forces.


14.

Plato's perfect state is according to these considerations certainly something still greater than even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe, not to mention the smiling mien of superiority with which our 'historically' educated refuse such a fruit of antiquity. The proper aim of the state, the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius,---compared with whom all other things are only tools, expedients, and factors towards realization---is here discovered with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness. Plato saw through the awfully devastated herm of the then-existing state-life and perceived even then something divine in its interior. He believed  that one might be able to take out this divine image and that the grim and barbarically distorted exterior did not belong to the essence of the state: the whole fervour and sublimity of his political passion threw itself upon this belief, upon that desire---in this blaze he was incinerated. That in his perfect state he did not place at the head the genius in its general meaning, but only the genius of wisdom and of knowledge, that he altogether excluded the genial artist from his state, that was a rigid consequence of the Socratic judgment on art, which Plato, in the struggle against himself, had made his own. This more external and almost incidental gap must not prevent us from recognizing in the total conception of the Platonic state the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a profound and eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the connection between state and genius. What we believed we could divine of this cryptograph we have said in this preface [in his dedication of 'The Greek State' and other essays to Cosima Wagner, he calls them "prefaces to unwritten and not to be written books"].

To summarise:

The proper aim of the state is the Olympian existence and ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius. This is the genius in its general meaning, not just the genius of wisdom and knowledge, and certainly also the artistic genius.

In paragraph 13, we saw what it is that confers dignity:

"[E]very human being, with his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is a means of the genius, consciously or unconsciously".

In that same paragraph, in the context of the military genius, we saw what it is that makes the genius confer dignity, on himself and others:

"I should think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius, and his labour again only a means of that same genius; and not to him as absolute man and non-genius, but to him as a means of the genius---the latter who can also choose the former's destruction, as a means to the martial work of art---is due a degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius."

As the military genius confers dignity on the warlike man by using him as a means to the martial work of art, so the genius in its general meaning confers dignity on the non-genius in its general meaning by using him as a means to the work of art in its general meaning. Thus far the 14 paragraphs of 'The Greek State'.


Attempt at a reconstruction of the essential argument.

Culture, which is chiefly a genuine need for art, rests upon a terrible basis [...]. In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. At their expense, through the surplus of their labour, that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want. [paragraph 5.]

This situation is brought about by conquest:

[W]hat can the state mean to us, if not the means by which that social process described just now is to be brought into flux and to be guaranteed in its unimpeded continuance. Be the sociable instinct [Trieb, "drive"] in individual man as strong as it may, it is only the iron clamp of the state that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a fashion that that chemical decomposition of society, with its pyramid-like superstructure, is bound to take place. Whence however originates this sudden power of the state, whose aim lies much beyond the insight and beyond the egoism of the individual? How did the slave, the blind mole of culture, originate? The Greeks in their instinct [Instinkt] relating to the law of nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct which even in the ripest fullness of their civilization and humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as: "To the victor belongs the vanquished, with wife and child, life and property. Power gives the first right, and there is no right, which at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence."[paragraph 7.]

In paragraph 11, Nietzsche implies that, contrary to Hobbes, he thinks that the state of nature is not necessarily a war of all against all, but can---admittedly at best---be a war of all families against all families. And indeed, in a long piece from the Nachlass that may be regarded as the sequel to 'The Greek State', and is sometimes titled 'The Greek Woman', Nietzsche argues that the family complements the state, if necessary (i.e., if the state is not perfect, like Plato's ideal state).

This state of nature overcomes itself, bringing forth a 'state', when one---extended, not nuclear!---family overpowers and enslaves another. A 'caste system' emerges:

Conquerors
Conquered

The surplus labour of the enslaved conquered allows the conquerors to devote themselves to 'leisure' activities like art. While the conquered have to toil, the conquerors can 'dream':

[T]he totality of the dream-life of many human beings is [...] the preparation of the [Apollinian] genius.[Nachlass Anfang 1871 10 [1].]

The military genius is the prototypical Apollinian genius:

The Apollinian genius---development of the military genius into the political one, into the sage (Age of the Seven), into the poet, into the sculptor, painter. (Continuity [Fortbestehen, "persistance"] of the older species.)[Nachlass 1871 9 [130].]

The Apollinian genius is of course the genius of vision. It is through the visions ('dreams') of this genius that nature finds her "deliverance in appearance" (paragraph 9):

As long as [in the example of the sculptor] the statue still floats as a fantasy image [Phantasiebild] before the eyes of the artist, he is still playing with the real [i.e., with nature]: when he translates this image into the marble, he is playing with the dream.['The Dionysian Worldview', 1.]

The Primordial One is already delivered when the artist (in the broad sense: according to BT 1, every man is wholly an artist while---literally---dreaming) plays with the 'real' (nature, which is itself a dream by the Primordial One). For the Primordial One experiences everything the 'characters' in the 'play' It imagines (nature) experience. But nature itself does not. The genius is a part of nature, and he is the only part of nature that sees his visions. Therefore, the "mirror of the genius" (paragraph 9) in which nature comes "to her deliverance in appearance" must be the actualised artwork, not the artist's fantasy image.  

Now the military genius is an Apollinian genius in that he is, so to say, inspired not by the 'Dionysian' (Titanic or barbaric) war god Ares, but by the 'Apollinian' war goddess Athena. His art is the art of tactics and strategy. And not only do his tactical and strategic visions deliver the Primordial One, and not only do the practical applications of these visions deliver nature, but his art is the only thing that can artificially bring about the emergence of genius. In the state of nature, the emergence of the genius can only be a fortunate accident: as we saw in paragraph 7-8, the first state comes about when one family conquers another---and this means the conquering family has, at its head, a military genius ("the original founder of states" (paragraph 13)).

In fact, such a conquering family may be considered an archaic or archetypical (Urbild literally means "archetype", not "prototype") state:

He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility, the soldiers' profession, with respect to the hitherto described nature of the state, must arrive at the insight that through war and in the soldiers' profession is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps the prototype of the state. Here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes, out of which rises pyramid-shaped, on an exceedingly broad bottom layer of slaves, the edifice of the 'martial society'.

Such a family is itself organised, itself a pyramid. And such an organisation is indeed what is bound to occur in the state of nature, which is a state of war:

[W]ar represents a social modality through which a society seeks to overcome a crisis.[Philip Quadrio, 'Odhinn and Tyr: Two modes of Sovereignty'.]

Nietzsche later described the effect on a group of people of such a crisis in a manner reminiscent of his description of that effect in paragraphs 8 and 13:

It is the value of such a crisis that it purifies, that it pushes together related elements to perish of each other, that it assigns common tasks to men who have opposite ways of thinking---and it also brings to light the weaker and less secure among them and thus promotes an order of rank according to strength, from the point of view of health: those who command are recognized as those who command, those who obey as those who obey. Of course, outside every existing social order. [WP 55 (1887).]

This is how the genius emerges in a state of crisis: it is the military genius. This genius can only develop into the political genius, and beyond (see Nachlass 1871 9 [130], quoted above), in a state of stability. In fact, I think the political genius is, in the beginning, simply the military genius in times of peace/stability:

[The] Magical Images [of the Sephiroth Chesed and Geburah] are both kings; that of Chesed a king on his throne, and that of Geburah a king in his chariot; in other words, the rulers of the kingdom in peace and in war; the one a lawgiver and the other a warrior.[Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, XVIII, 5-6.]

The more stable the society is, the further the Apollinian genius can develop away from his original, political function---all the way to wholly 'luxurious' forms, like the sculptor. But this is a development into the breadth. There is also a development into the height, and this occurs due to the intra-political effect of the war-tendency: see paragraphs 10 and 11, and cf. another 'preface' Nietzsche dedicated to Mrs. Wagner: 'Homer's Contest'.

And not only the development into the height of the political genius and beyond depends on the intra-political effect of the war-tendency, but that of the military genius as well. As Clausewitz says:

[A]mongst uncivilised people we never find a really great general, and very seldom what we can properly call a military genius, because that requires a development of the intelligent powers which cannot be found in an uncivilised state.[Clausewitz, On War, Chapter III.]

In Nietzsche's words, it requires a development of "the power to feel the rapture of the vision" (Nachlass Anfang 1871 10 [1]). This idea is also found, in ironic form, in Plato's 'Ion':

Socrates. Do you mean that a rhapsode will know better than the pilot what the ruler of a sea-tossed vessel ought to say?
Ion. No; the pilot will know best.
Soc. Or will the rhapsode know better than the physician what the ruler of a sick man ought to say?
Ion. He will not.
Soc. But he will know what a slave ought to say?
Ion. Yes.
Soc. Suppose the slave to be a cowherd; the rhapsode will know better than the cowherd what he ought to say in order to soothe the infuriated cows?
Ion. No, he will not.
Soc. But he will know what a spinning-woman ought to say about the working of wool?
Ion. No.
Soc. At any rate he will know what a general ought to say when exhorting his soldiers?
Ion. Yes, that is the sort of thing which the rhapsode will be sure to know.
Soc. Well, but is the art of the rhapsode the art of the general?
Ion. I am sure that I should know what a general ought to say.
Soc. Why, yes, Ion, because you may possibly have a knowledge of the art of the general as well as of the rhapsode; and you may also have a knowledge of horsemanship as well as of the lyre: and then you would know when horses were well or ill managed. But suppose I were to ask you: By the help of which art, Ion, do you know whether horses are well managed, by your skill as a horseman or as a performer on the lyre---what would you answer?
Ion. I should reply, by my skill as a horseman.
Soc. And if you judged of performers on the lyre, you would admit that you judged of them as a performer on the lyre, and not as a horseman?
Ion. Yes.
Soc. And in judging of the general's art, do you judge of it as a general or a rhapsode?
Ion. To me there appears to be no difference between them.
Soc. What do you mean? Do you mean to say that the art of the rhapsode and of the general is the same?
Ion. Yes, one and the same.
Soc. Then he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general?
Ion. Certainly, Socrates.
Soc. And he who is a good general is also a good rhapsode?
Ion. No; I do not say that.
Soc. But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general.
Ion. Certainly.
Soc. And you are the best of Hellenic rhapsodes?
Ion. Far the best, Socrates.
Soc. And are you the best general, Ion?
Ion. To be sure, Socrates; and Homer was my master.

Socrates never really succeeds at refuting this claim of Ion's, and indeed, he concludes:

You have literally as many forms as Proteus; and now you go all manner of ways, twisting and turning, and, like Proteus, become all manner of people at once, and at last slip away from me in the disguise of a general[.]

Ion succeeded in slipping away from the cunning Socrates! Could it be that the connection between the genial Apollinian artist and the military genius "is here discovered with a poetic intuition" (paragraph 14) by Plato?

In any case:

The Greek Will made it impossible for the need of culture to be satisfied in the seclusion of a small circle.[Nachlass Ende 1870-April 1871 7 [122], a.k.a. 'The Greek Woman'.]

The military genius is necessary for any artificial development of Apollinian genius. But he is not himself aware of this fact; nor are most other kinds of Apollinian genius. The only kind of Apollinian genius who is aware of this is the genius of wisdom and knowledge (who may perhaps not be simply equated with the sage, by the way). Case in point: Nietzsche, in this very essay. In this sense, then, Plato was right, if not in excluding the genial artist from his state, at least in placing the genius of wisdom and knowledge at the head of it. Did Nietzsche realise this?

To be sure, Nietzsche later envisaged a synthesis of the military genius and the genius of wisdom and knowledge:

The human horizon.---One can conceive philosophers as those who make the most extreme efforts to test how far man could elevate himself---Plato especially: how far his strength will reach. But they do it as individuals; perhaps the instinct of the Caesars, of founders of states, etc., was greater, as they pondered how far man might be driven in his evolution and under 'favourable conditions'. But they had an insufficient understanding of the nature of favourable circumstances. Great question: where has the plant 'man' hitherto grown up most magnificently? For this question the study of comparative history is necessary.[The Will to Power, section 973 (1885), entire.]The artist-philosopher. Higher concept of art. Whether a man can place himself so far distant from other men that he can form them? (---Preliminary exercises: (1) he who forms himself, the hermit; (2) the artist hitherto, as a perfecter on a small scale, working on material.)[ibid., section 795 (1885-1886), entire.]

I think Nietzsche ranked those who formed themselves higher than those who only worked on 'material'. Thus we may establish the following order of rank:

1. Philosophical men of power [Gewalt, "violence"] and artist-tyrants (cf. WP 960);
2. Caesars, founders of states (non-philosophical);
3. Philosophers (non-tyrannical);
4. Those who form themselves, hermits (non-tyrannical);
5. Artists as perfecters on a smaller scale (non-tyrannical,
non-philosophical).

If we now merge #s 3 and 4, which I think is an obvious thing to do, we see that the order of rank of artists ranges from merely artistic men through artistic and philosophical men and artistic and tyrannical men to men who are both artistic, philosophical, and tyrannical. The reason # 2 ranks higher than # 3, in my view, is that # 2 has the instinct, but not the wisdom, whereas # 3 has the wisdom but not the instinct: thus # 2 lacks a thing of the mind, spirit, or intellect (Geist), whereas # 3 lacks a thing of the body---and the body is more fundamental than the spirit for Nietzsche.

I have elsewhere expressed the idea that those of rank # 1 shall have the instinct of an uncorrupted Caesar (cf. WP 1026, where Nietzsche calls Napoleon a corrupted Caesar) and the understanding of an uncorrupted Plato (and was Plato himself really corrupted by Socrates? Or is that only the exoteric Plato?...). We may also think here of Nietzsche's idea of the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ (WP 983): Christianity is a form of Platonism, after all (BGE Preface). Compare section 6 above.