Friedrich Nietzsche

Writings of the Early Notebooks

Notebook 30

38 The happiness of the individual in the state is subordinated to the common good: what does that mean? Not that the minorities are used for the good of the majorities. Rather that the individuals are subordinated to the good of the supreme individuals, the good of the supreme specimens. The supreme individuals are the creative men, be they the best in a moral sense or the best and most useful in some other important sense, that is, the purest types and improvers of mankind. The goal of the polity is not the existence of a state at all costs, but the possibility for the supreme specimens to live and work in it. This is also the foundation on which states come into being, although people have often had a wrong idea of who the supreme specimens were: often conquerors, etc., dynasts. Ifit is no longer possible to maintain the existence of a state in which the great individuals can live and work, a terrible state based on necessity and robbery comes into being: a state in which the strongest individuals take the place of the best. The task of the state is not to enable as many people as possible to lead good and moral lives in it. Numbers do not matter: what matters is that a good and beautiful life as such should be possible in a state; that the state should provide the foundation of a culture. In short: the goal of the state is a nobler humanity. The state’s goal is beyond the state: the state is a means to an end. Today the element that binds all the partial forces together is missing: and so we see that everything is hostile to everything else and all the noble forces are engaged in a mutually devastating war of annihilation. I will demonstrate this by means of philosophy, which destroys because it is bound by nothing. The philosopher has become a public menace. He annihilates happiness, virtue, culture, and finally himself. To avoid this, philosophy must be an ally of the binding force, a physician of culture