Zadanie ludzkości: wydawanie wielkich ludzi

Nietzsche formulates this proposition: "Humanity must work unceasingly for the production of solitary great men--this and nothing else is its task." This is the same formula at which several aristocratic spirits among his contemporaries have arrived. Thus Renan says, almost in the same words: "In fine, the object of humanity is the production of great men ... nothing but great men; salvation will come from great men." And we see from Flaubert's letters to George Sand how convinced he was of the same thing. He says, for instance: "The only rational thing is and always will be a government of mandarins, provided that the mandarins can do something, or rather, can do much.... It matters little whether a greater or smaller number of peasants are able to read instead of listening to their priest, but it is infinitely important that many men like Renan and Littré may live and be heard. Our salvation now lies in a real aristocracy."[4] Both Renan and Flaubert would have subscribed to Nietzsche's fundamental idea that a nation is the roundabout way Nature goes in order to produce a dozen great men.