PARTISAN REVIEW
tural continuity. The fight is waged not for the abrogation of the values
of the cultural past, but for something that looms before men's minds
as a supreme task-the revitalization in it of everything that has an
objective and timeless significance-and for their transvaluation in the
nearest future . The lion who has come out of the depths and leapt upon
the accepted values has not arisen from the camel, and he is not only
a beast of prey, but as Nietzsche also conceived of him, he is the lion–
man, to whom "nothing human is alien." And now, in accordance with
the prototype given by Nietzsche, he is breaking the old tablets of the
Law and trying to scratch new laws on new tablets,
utnque leonis.
I think that in doing this he will uselessly spoil a considerable
number of marble slabs and eternal bronze ; but I also think that some
unique and deep trace of the lion's claws will never be erased from the
monuments of our ancient Egypt. Moreover, what is in question is
not the content of the new "twelve tablets," but the method of dealing
with values. The method of the revolution which has driven you and
me, physically weary and exhausted, into a communal sanatorium where
we talk about health, is predominantly a historical and social, and
even a political method, and not a utopian and anarchistic, that is, an
individual one, a method of those who remain and are settled, not of
those who run away and are nomadic-in so far, I will add, as we do not
at present touch upon the questions of spiritual ascent, of growth along
the vertical line, where all rights and duties are taken over by the
principle of individuality, the unique and irreplaceable human in–
dividual.
However, now we have again come close to its sacred circle. I
maintain that individuality-the spirit that animates it-contains both
Mount Nebo and the Promised Land itself. You oppose individuality
and value, comparing Napoleon's mother who nursed him, with the
same mother estranged and observing a son who, from the throne
of deadening glory, now appears to her as a magnificent and cold sar–
cophagus of past life, past love. My friend, the deepest aspiration of
the human will was well expressed by the Pharaohs who considered it
their main task to erect a tomb worthy of themselves. Everything that is
living desires not only self-preservation, but also self-revelation, know–
ing in its inmost being that the latter is self-exhaustion, self-destruction,
death-and perhaps eternal memory. The wish to leave some trace
after one has passed, to turn life into a monument of value, to disap–
pear and to be preserved in the living cult of the principle that animates
us-this is the source of the age-old human "aretaism," as the Hellenes,
the Dorians, called their categorical imperative of active valor. The ini-
1038
