Rather be a living slave than a dead king

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. In Section Fourteen, Nietzsche paraphrases a famous line from The Odyssey, comparing the weak-willed philologist who can only repeat others' words to the pale and powerless Pluto, king of the underworld. His warning is straightforward: better to be a slave and dedicate your life to a current cause than to submit to the dead for the sake of being a king.

The Hades of Homer--From what type of existence is it really copied? I think it is the description of the philologist: it is better to be a day-labourer than to have such an anæmic recollection of the past.--[No doubt a reminiscence of the "Odyssey," --TR.]

"We Philologists" 14, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

A brief but information-rich section. The last sentence is an allusion, from Book XI of The Odyssey, "The Journey to the Underworld":

I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished.

In the context of the story, the protagonist Odysseus summons the dead in the underworld with a ritual and sees the dead Achilles. Odysseus praises Achilles as "thou rulest mightily among the dead," but Achilles replies sadly that he would rather be a slave and live than be the leader of the dead.

Nietzsche paraphrases Achilles' words, rewriting them as:

preferring to be a day laborer, rather than possessing such anemic historical memory.

Nietzsche always believed that the background of all myths and legends is the real life experience of ancient people, so he asked here: What kind of life experience is behind Hades, the king of the underworld in Homer's epic? What kind of personality type prompted the author of Homer's epic to create the image of Hades? Nietzsche's answer is: philologist. More accurately, it is the general philologist (such as Voss), different from the born philologist who cannot become a philologist.

Hades is a weak, bloodless, shadowy being. In his journey to the underworld, Odysseus summoned countless dead people with rituals, who were attracted by the blood of the living and surrounded him like zombies, eager to draw the vitality of the living from the blood.

Why would Nietzsche say that the prototype of Hades is a philologist? Were there philologists in ancient times? Of course not. But the same personality type does exist, namely, the weak scholar who lacks courage and physical strength to go to war, always inclined to maintain their survival through trickery and rhetoric. There will always be people like this in any era, only hiding behind the monuments of ancient great men, relying on absorbing the residual vitality of their predecessors to survive. Philologists are the kings of such people (Hades), and they have developed a whole set of theories and methodologies around this parasitic mode of survival, providing nutrients for many "living dead" people and maintaining their anemic lives.

Nietzsche paraphrases Achilles' response, both in remembrance of the great hero Achilles and in borrowing his words to convey the advice of the ancients: it is better to be a slave and dedicate one's life to a current cause than to bow down to the dead in order to become a king.

The value that history can have is only open to the viewer who takes the perspective of the present. The weakness of the philologist of Hades lies in the fact that they can only watch history in the way of a hindsight wisdom, seeing history as the history of the victorious and the defeated, the history of fateful causation, and summarizing what they call historical lessons from it. They dare not face the appearance of historical figures when they were alive: for the parties involved in history, there is no hindsight wisdom, and the future is still full of uncertainty, and no historical lesson is absolutely reliable. In the end, the reason why historical figures are so tall is that they bear the risks that ordinary people cannot bear, and they bet their entire lives. Philologists lack this courage and can only summarize historical lessons first, then deceive themselves into following the footsteps of the ancients, fully believing that their clumsy cosplay has re-enlivened the ancients more or less.

This is what Nietzsche called "existing for others," except that the "others" here are not even living people, but people dead for thousand years. It's vanitya alright, but it's also useless. You might as well not bother the ancients and "be a day-labourer," that way at least you pay some effort to the living, insteading of wasting your vitality.