Herbivores and Beasts of Prey

For man is a beast of prey. Fine thinkers, like Montaigne and Nietzsche, have always known it. The wisdom of life in the old tales and proverbs of all peasant- and nomad-peoples, the smiling insight of the great knowers of men — statesmen, generals, merchants, judges — at the height of a rich life, the despair of failed world-betterers and the scolding of angry priests, were all far from wishing to conceal or deny it. Only the solemn earnestness of idealist philosophers and — of other theologians — lacked the courage for what one knew quite well in secret. Ideals are cowardices. And yet from their works one could put together a pretty collection of the sayings that have now and then slipped from them about the beast that is man.

But with this insight earnest must at last be made. Scepticism, the last philosophical attitude still possible to this age, the one worthy of it, permits no talking-around any longer. Nevertheless, and for that very reason, I set myself against views that have been developed out of the natural science of the last century. The anatomical contemplation and ordering of the animal kingdom is, in keeping with its descent, governed throughout by materialistic points of view. If the image of the body — as it presents itself to the human eye, and to that alone, and moreover of the cut-up, chemically prepared, experimentally maltreated body — led to a system, founded by Linnaeus and deepened palaeontologically by the school of Darwin, a system of resting, optical particulars, then there exists alongside it quite another, unsystematic ordering of the kinds of life, one that discloses itself only to the unlearned fellow-feeling, to the inwardly felt kinship of I and Thou, such as every peasant knows, but also every genuine poet and artist. I like to ponder the physiognomy of the kinds of animal life, the kinds of animal souls, and leave the systematics of bodily structure to the zoologists. And then there results quite another rank-order of life — not of the body.

A plant lives, although only in a restricted sense is it a living being.³ In reality it is lived, in it or about it. “It” breathes, “it” feeds, “it” propagates itself, and yet it is, quite properly, only the stage of these processes, which form a unity with those of the surrounding Nature, with day and night, with the sun’s radiation and the fermentation in the soil, so that the plant itself can neither will nor choose. Everything happens with it and in it. It seeks neither the place, nor the nourishment, nor the other plant with which it begets its offspring. It does not move; rather the wind, the warmth, the light move it.

Above this kind of life there rises now the freely-moving life of the animals, but in two stages. There is one kind, running through all the anatomical genera, from the single-celled protozoon up to swimming-birds and hoofed beasts, whose life is referred for its preservation to the unmoving plant-world as nourishment. Plants do not flee, and cannot defend themselves.

But above this there rises a second kind of life: animals that live by other animals, whose life consists in killing. Here the prey is itself highly mobile, itself fighting, itself rich in cunning of every sort. This life too is spread over all the genera of the system. Every drop of water is a battlefield, and we, who have the struggle on land so constantly before our eyes that we forget its obviousness, indeed its very existence, see today with horror how fantastic forms of the deep sea lead the life of killing and of being killed.

The beast of prey is the highest form of the freely-moving life. It signifies the maximum of freedom from others and for oneself, of self-responsibility, of aloneness, the extreme of the necessity of asserting oneself by fighting, conquering, destroying. It gives the type man a high rank, that he is a beast of prey.

A herbivore is, by its destiny, a prey-animal, and seeks to escape this doom by combatless flight. A beast of prey makes prey. The one life is, in its innermost essence, defensive; the other is offensive, hard, cruel, destroying. The very tactic of movement distinguishes them — on the one side the habit of fleeing, the swift run, the doubling-back, the swerving, the hiding-away; on the other, the straight-line movement of the attack, the leap of the lion, the swoop of the eagle. There is a cunning, an outwitting, in the style of the strong and of the weak. Clever in the human sense, actively clever, are only beasts of prey. Herbivores, by comparison, are stupid — not only the doves “without guile” and the elephant, but even the noblest kinds of hoofed beasts: the bull, the horse, the stag, which are capable of fighting only in blind rage and in sexual excitement, and otherwise let themselves be tamed and led by a child. To the distinction of the movements there is added, more powerfully still, that of the sense-organs. And with the senses there differs also the way of having a “world.” In and for itself every being lives in Nature, in a surrounding, whether it remarks it or makes itself remarkable to it or not. Only through the mysterious manner — explicable by no human reflection — of the relations between the animal and its surrounding, by means of the groping, ordering, understanding senses, does there arise out of the surrounding a world-around for each single being. The higher herbivores are governed, beside hearing, above all by scent; the higher beasts of prey, however, rule by the eye. Scent is the proper sense of defence. The nose tracks the origin and the distance of the danger, and so gives to the movement of flight a purposive direction, away from something.

But the eye of the beast of prey gives a goal. By the very fact that the pairs of eyes of the great beasts of prey, as in man, can be fixed upon a single point of the surrounding, they succeed in spellbinding the prey-animal. In the hostile gaze there lies already, for the victim, its inescapable destiny, the leap of the next moment. But the fixing of the forward- and parallel-directed eyes is one and the same thing as the arising of the world in the sense in which man has it: as picture, as world before his gaze, as world not only of light and of colours, but above all of perspectival distance, of space and of the movements taking place within it and the objects resting at definite places. In this manner of seeing, which only the noblest beasts of prey possess — herbivores, e.g. hoofed beasts, have eyes set sideways, each of which has another, unperspectival impression — there lies already the idea of ruling. The world-picture is the world-around mastered by the eye. The beast-of-prey eye determines things by position and distance. It knows the horizon. It measures, in this battlefield, the objects and the conditions of attack. Scenting and spying — the roe and the hawk — stand to each other as being-a-slave and being-a-master. An infinite feeling of power lies in this wide, calm gaze, a feeling of the freedom that springs from superiority and rests upon the greater force, and the certainty of being no one’s prey. The world is the prey: out of this fact, in the last analysis, human Culture has grown.

And at last this fact of inborn superiority has deepened — outward, toward the light-world with its infinite distances, and inward, toward the soul-kind of strong animals. The soul, that enigmatic something which is felt at this word and whose essence is accessible to no science, the divine spark in this living body, which in the divinely cruel, divinely unconcerned world must rule or go under: what we men feel as soul, in ourselves and in others, is the counter-pole of the light-world about us, in which human thinking and divining likes to assume a world-soul. The soul is the more strongly stamped, the lonelier the being, the more decidedly it forms a world for itself, against all the world about it. What is the opposite of the soul of a lion? The soul of a cow. Herbivores replace the strong single soul by the great number, the herd, the common feeling and doing of masses. But the less one needs the others, the mightier one is. A beast of prey is everyone’s enemy. It tolerates in its domain no one of its own kind — here the kingly concept of property has its root. Property is the sphere in which one exercises unlimited power: power fought for, defended against one’s own kind, victoriously asserted. It is no right to a mere having, but to a sovereign disposing and governing with it.

There is, if one understands it rightly, a beast-of-prey ethic and a herbivore ethic. No one is able to alter anything in this. It is the inner form, the meaning, the tactic of the whole of life. It is a simple fact. One can destroy life, but not change it in its kind. A tamed, captive beast of prey — every zoological garden offers examples of it — is in soul mutilated, world-sick, inwardly destroyed. There are beasts of prey that starve themselves of their own will when they are captive. Herbivores give up nothing when they become domestic animals.

That is the difference between the destiny of herbivores and the beast-of-prey destiny. The one only threatens; the other bestows as well. The one presses down, makes small and cowardly; the other elevates through power and victory, through pride and possession. The one is suffered; the other is oneself. The struggle of the Nature within against the Nature without is no longer felt as misery — so Schopenhauer and Darwin thought of the struggle for life — but as the great meaning of life, which ennobles it: so thought Nietzsche, amor fati. And man belongs to this kind.

He is no simpleton, “good by nature” and stupid, no half-ape with technical tendencies, as Haeckel described him and Gabriel Max painted him. Upon this caricature there still falls the plebeian shadow of Rousseau. On the contrary, the tactic of his life is that of a splendid, brave, cunning, cruel beast of prey. He lives attacking, killing, destroying. He will be master, ever since there has been such a thing as he.

So is “technics” really older than man? No — yet it is not. There is a monstrous difference between man and all other animals. The technics of these animals is genus-technics. It is neither inventive nor learnable nor capable of development. The type bee has, ever since it existed, built its combs always exactly as it does today, and will build them so until it dies out. They belong to it like the form of the wings and the colouring of the body. Only the anatomical standpoint of the zoologists lets bodily structure and manner of life fall apart. If one starts from the inner form of life, instead of from that of the body, then this tactic of life and the articulation of the body are one and the same, both the expression of an organic actuality. The “genus” is a form not of the visibly resting, but of mobility; not of being-thus, but of doing-thus. Bodily form is the form of the active body.

Bees, termites, beavers raise astonishing structures. Ants know plant-culture, road-building, slavery and the conduct of war. Brood-care, fortifications and planned migrations are widely spread. Everything that man can do, single animal-forms too have achieved. They are tendencies that sleep as possibilities in freely-moving life as such. Man accomplishes nothing that is not attainable by life as a whole.

And nevertheless — all that has at bottom nothing whatever to do with human technics. Genus-technics is unchangeable. That is what the word “instinct” means. Because animal “thinking” cleaves to the immediate here-and-now and knows neither past nor future, it knows neither experience nor care. It is not true that animal-females “care” for their young. Care is a feeling that presupposes a knowing out into the distance, about what is to come, as shame presupposes a knowing about what has been. An animal can neither repent nor despair. Brood-care is, like everything else, a dark, knowledge-less being-driven in many types of life. It belongs to the kind and not to the single being. Genus-technics is not only unchangeable, but also impersonal.

But human technics, and it alone, is independent of the life of the human genus. It is the single case in the whole history of life that the single being steps out of the compulsion of the genus. One must reflect long to grasp the monstrousness of this fact. Technics in the life of man is conscious, arbitrary, alterable, personal, inventive. It is learned and improved. Man has become the creator of his tactic of living. That is his greatness and his doom. And the inner form of this creative life we call Culture — to possess Culture, to create Culture, to suffer from Culture. The creations of man are the expression of this existence in personal form.