#higher man

The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

Friedrich Nietzsche considered such utopianism contemptibly naive. While he never explicitly engaged with the thought of his contemporary, Marx, he did vociferously attack democratic socialists and forward an implicit critique of Hegel's progressive interpretation of human history. On Nietzsche's view, rather than being headed toward an egalitarian utopia, the teleology of human history is no exception to teleology in nature at large. It is evolutionary and will end with the extinction of the human species and the rise of a new Posthuman form of life. Just as the ape-men from which we evolved are no longer around, the human being as it has been known to recorded history will also be superseded and supplanted by a higher species, a new race, that is superhuman by comparison. Furthermore, the end of human history will be marked not just by the evolutionary leap that gives rise to the Superman, but also by a parallel devolution of the human being into "the Last Man." The latter is an epitome of everything that Nietzsche finds most despicable about "merely human" beings, namely their propensity to seek comfort above all else, complacency to the point of refusing  to strive for any higher goal, thoughtless conformity with the expectations of the masses and persecutory suspicion of everything exceptional and everyone who stands apart and alone. Accordingly, the Superman is not the supremely human being, but a future type of person who has overcome what is merely human.

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

According to this conception, every victory has a mystical side, in the most objective sense of the term: in the victor, in the leader, in the imperator acclaimed on the fields of battle, one had the sense of a sudden manifestation of divine force which transfigured this figure and transcended his humanity.

Indeed, empire, in the true sense of the word, can exist only if it animated by a powerful spiritual impetus, by a powerful spiritual  impetus, by a faith, by something which addresses the same spiritual depth from which religion itself takes life. Without this, there can never issue anything but a creature of violence -- 'imperialism' -- and a mechanical disanimate superstructure. For this reason it is needful to capture --if we can put it that way -- the same forces which act in the faiths, without injuring these faiths, but rather integrating them and carrying them to a higher level.

The Classical and Mediterranean world exalted the sense of individual dignity, of difference, of aristocracy and hierarchy: it set, above every other, the ideal of culture, in the sense of the realization of the self, of the creation of 'types,' of living works of art expressing complete persons. And in the autarchy, blooming out of the superb dominion of those who possess themselves, of the Doric and Homeric type, whose purity is strength and whose strength is purity, it recognized virtus, which brings the human to communicate with the non-human.

The dominator is he who has at his disposal a greater quantity of being, by which others are fatally---almost without his, in a certain sense, even desiring it --kindred, attracted, impelled; he is the one who imposes himself, so to speak, with his mere presence, like that deeper and more fearful gaze which others do not know how to resist, like that calm greatness which magically paralyzes even armed, proud men and directly arouses respect, the need to obey, to sacrifice oneself, to place one's truer life within this vaster life. In him an entire line, an entire tradition and an entire history burn, as if in their act: they cease to be abstractions, they cease to be transcendent, generalities; they become individual reality, concreteness, life ---an absolute life, because it is a life which an end in and of itself, because it is pure liberty---spirit, light.