28
LIONEL TRILLING
The Birth of Tragedy
should include Nietzsche's
The Genealogy
of Morals.
For here, among many other ideas most pertinent to
the
mystique
of modern literature, was the view of society which
is consonant with the belief that art and not ethics constitutes
the essential metaphysical activity of man and with the valida–
tion and ratification of the primitive energies. Nietzsche's theory
of the social order dismisses all ethical impulse from its origins–
the basis of society is to be found in the rationalization of
cruelty: as simple .as that. Nietzsche has no ultimate Utopian in–
tention in saying this, no hope of revising the essence of the social
order, although he does believe that its pain can be mitigated.
He represents cruelty as a social necessity, for only by its exer–
cise could men ever have been induced to develop a continuity of
will: nothing else than cruelty could have created in mankind
that memory of intention which makes society possible. The
method of cynicism which Nietzsche pursued-let us
be
clear
that it is a method and not an attitude-goes so far as to describe
punishment in terms of the pleasure derived from the exercise
of cruelty: "Compensation," he says, "consists
in
a legal war–
rant entitling one man to exercise his cruelty on
anot~er."
There
follows that most remarkable passage in which Nietzsche de–
scribes the process whereby the individual turns the cruelty of
punishment against himself and creates the bad conscience and
the consciousness of guilt which manifests itself as a pervasive
anxiety. Nietzsche's complexity of mind is beyond all comparison,
for in this book which is dedicated to the liberation of the con–
science, Nietzsche makes
his
defense of the bad conscience as a
decisive force in the interests of culture. It is much the same line
of argument that he takes when, having attacked the Jewish
morality and the priestly existence in the name of the health of
the spirit, he reminds us that only by his sickness does man
be–
come interesting.
From
The Genealogy of Morals
to Freud's
Civilization and
its Discontents
is but a step, and some might think that, for peda–
gogic purposes, the step
is
so small as to make the second book
