PARASITES AND THEIR EXTERMINATOR

This entry utilizes the same rather lengthy passage in Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung as has already been used in my entry Down And Aside in the Collective section. It is a tremendously important passage, however, hence the quasi-repetition.

Every individual may be scrutinized to see, whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. (This is actually a more subtle way of setting our evaluation criterion than my direct evocation of such unyielding terms as constructive and destructive. I have no intention of disposing with my parameters, and I will return to them quite soon, but in the meantime Nietzsche’s general criterion may be considered as the starting point for this complicated discussion.) Having made that decision, one has a canon for the worth of his self-interest. (In the sense that individual self-interest, even when the individual is making a constructive contribution to society, always carries a certain value tag, and has to be entered into the equation of relative worth.) If he represents the ascending line, then his worth is, indeed, extraordinary-- and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step farther through him, the care for his preservation, and for the creation of the best conditions for him, may even be extreme. The single one, the “individual” as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error, after all. He is nothing by himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from former times.-- He is the whole single line of humanity up to himself. If conversely, he typifies the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration and sickness (sicknesses are, in general, the consequences of decay, not its causes), then he has small worth (!) and the minimum of decency requires that he take away as little as possible from those who have turned out well. He is merely their parasite. (Die Götzen-Dämmerung, Skirmishes Of An Untimely Man, #33.)

Here is a rather uncharitable prescription for social eugenics that I am unwilling to analyze at its literal face value, where my disagreement with Nietzsche’s approach becomes unnecessarily extreme.

Nietzsche’s point is neatly capsulated in one short phrase later on in the piece quoted above. The sick man is a parasite of society, he proceeds in Die Götzen-Dämmerung, Skirmishes Of An Untimely Man, #36. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life has been lost, that should prompt a deep contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt-- not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility of the physician, for all cases, in which the highest interest of ascending life demands the most inconsiderate pushing down, and aside, of degenerating life,-- for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live. (I am pretty sure about what Hippocrates would have said to this, but Hitler would certainly agree!)

The bottom line in this entry is to represent the ostensible cruelty of these lines (if taken literally) as a harsh and challenging metaphor, which, when seen as such, makes a world of difference. (Yet it does allow its readers to get a wrong impression from reading it literally, and in that case this passage can become quite dangerous, and must be therefore handled with extreme care and a thick pack of caveats.)