STEPHEN MILLER.
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soul (also known as "overman" or free spirit or free man) despises finan–
cial considerations of any kind. "Not to understand trade is noble,"
Nietzsche says in
The Dawn of Day.
This lower form of self-interest,
Nietzsche says, is widespread in the modern age. "Our moderns," he says,
"with our virtues of work, modesty, legality, and scientism - ac–
cumulating, economic, machinelike - appear as a
weak
age."
England, Nietzsche says, is the chief "modern" nation. He speaks dis–
paragingly of many English writers, and he despises what he calls English
morality - a morality, he says, that equates virtue with "the striving for
English
happiness...." Nietzsche dismisses the idea that the English are a
free people. How can the English be free, he asks, when they practice the
morality of slaves? "The human being," he says, "who has become free ...
spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers,
Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats."
Though Nietzsche, like Marx, continually attacks bourgeois society
and complains that the wrong men "have so far held sway over the fate of
Europe," he would undoubtedly recoil at the idea of a political program
for putting noble souls in power. "The free man," he says, "is a
warrior,"
but he means by warrior a state of mind rather than a way of life. Noble
souls, he implies, have nothing to do with politics. These free spirits are
"born, sworn, jealous friends of
solitude.
..." Moreover, noble souls are not
easily identifiable, for individuals may be mixtures of nobility and baseness;
master morality and slave morality "at times . . . occur directly alongside
each other - even in the same human being, within a single soul."
Being a noble soul is less a question of having or acquiring certain
traits than possessing a sense of the self that borders on the mystical.
Nietzsche says the noble soul is known neither by his actions - "actions
are prone to many interpretations, always unfathomable" - nor his
"works": "It is not the works, it is
thefaith
that is decisive here ... some
fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that
cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost." Walter Kaufmann regrets
that Nietzsche "is easily misunderstood," yet Nietzsche invites misunder–
standing because his key ideas are obscure - especially the idea of the
noble soul.
What Nietzsche celebrates is fuzzy, but what he condemns is clear: his
work is a diatribe against bourgeois man. Such a view of bourgeois man
is commonplace in nineteenth-century literature; the pharmacist
Monsieur Homais in
Madame Bovary
is an example. But Nietzsche's view
is more radical than Flaubert's. Not only does he attack bourgeois self–
interest, he also devalues the fundamental ideals of Western culture, that of
disinterested thought. According to him, the idea of a disinterested quest
for the truth is humbug. Those philosophers who say they are searching
