History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [438]
There are two sorts of saints: the saint by nature, and the saint from fear. The saint by nature has a spontaneous love of mankind; he does good because to do so gives him happiness. The saint from fear, on the other hand, like the man who only abstains from theft because of the police, would be wicked if he were not restrained by the thought of hell-fire or of his neighbours' vengeance. Nietzsche can only imagine the second sort of saint; he is so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. Does anyone suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of hell? Yet to Nietzsche Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent.
It remains to consider the main ethical problem raised by Nietzsche, namely: should our ethic be aristocratic, or should it, in some sense, treat all men alike? This is a question which, as I have just stated it, has no very clear meaning, and obviously, the first step is to try to make the issue more definite.
We must in the first place try to distinguish an aristocratic ethic from an aristocratic political theory. A believer in Bentham's principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number has a democratic ethic, but he may think that the general happiness is best promoted by an aristocratic form of government. This is not Nietzsche's position. He holds that the happiness of common people is no part of the good per se. All that is good or bad in itself exists only in the superior few; what happens to the rest is of no account.
The next question is: How are the superior few defined? In practice, they have usually been a conquering race or a hereditary aristocracy—and aristocracies have usually been, at least in theory, descendants of conquering races. I think Nietzsche would accept this definition. 'No morality is possible without good birth,' he tells us. He says that the noble caste is always at first barbarian, but that every elevation of Man is due to aristocratic society.
It is not clear whether Nietzsche regards the superiority of the aristocrat as congenital or as due to education and environment. If the latter, it is difficult to defend the exclusion of others from advantages for which, ex hypothesi, they are equally qualified. I shall therefore assume that he regards conquering aristocracies and their descendants as biologically superior to their subjects, as men are superior to domestic animals, though in a lesser degree.
What shall we mean by 'biologically superior'? We shall mean, when interpreting Nietzsche, that individuals of the superior race, and their descendants, are more likely to be 'noble' in Nietzsche's sense: they will have more strength of will, more courage, more impulse towards power, less sympathy, less fear, and less gentleness. We can now state Nietzsche's ethic. I think what follows is a fair analysis of it:
Victors in war, and their descendants, are usually biologically superior to the vanquished. It is therefore desirable that they should hold all the power, and should manage affairs exclusively in their own interests.
There is here still the word 'desirable' to be considered. What is 'desirable' in Nietzsche's philosophy? From the outsider's point of view, what Nietzsche calls 'desirable' is what Nietzsche desires. With this interpretation, Nietzsche's doctrine might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence : 'I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.' But this is not a philosophy; it is a biographical fact about a certain