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PARTISAN REVIEW
as a constant standard for others." Marx believed he had found this
standard in labor-time, and insisted that use values "which can be
acquired without labor have no exchange value" (though they retain
their "natural usefulness"), so that the earth itself is of "no value";
it does not represent "objectified labor." With this conclusion we come
to the threshold of a radical nihilism, to that denial of everything
given of which the nineteenth-century rebellions against tradition as
yet knew little and which rises only in twentieth-century society.
Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as
of the modernity of the term "value" when he accepted it as a key
notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the
current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise
quickly became manifest. Ideas in the sense of absolute units had
become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply
ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was chal–
lenged. Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the
meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollec–
tions and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always
been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and
newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense
of the new "value-free" science which was soon to degenerate into sci–
entism and general scientific superstition and which never, despite all
protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman
historians' attitude of
sine ira et studio.
For while the latter demanded
judgment without scorn and truth-finding without zeal, the
((wertfreie
Wissenschaft,"
which could no longer judge because it had lost its
standards of judgment and could no longer find truth because it
doubted the existence of truth, imagined that it could produce mean–
ingful results if only it abandoned the last remnants of those absolute
standards. And when Nietzsche proclaimed that he had discovered
"new and higher values," he was the first to fall prey to delusions
which he himself had helped to destroy, accepting the old t raditional
notion of measuring with transcendent units in its newest and most
hideous form, thereby again carrying the relativity and exchange–
ability of values into the very matters whose absolute dignity he had
wanted to assert-power and life and man's love of his earthly
existence.
