Nietzsche also encounters his own Socrates. These are the free thinkers. They say: "What are you complaining about? How could the weak have triumphed if they did not form superior force?" "Let us bow down before accomplished fact" (GM I 9). This is modern positivism. They claim to carry out the critique of values, they claim to refuse all appeals to transcendent values, they declare them unfashionable, but only in order to rediscover them as the forces which run the world today. The value of Church, morality, State etc. is only discussed so that their human force and content can be admired. The free thinker has the strange craze for recovering every content, everything positive, but without ever questioning the nature of these self-styled positives or the origin or quality of the corresponding human forces. This is what Nietzsche calls "fatalism" (GM III 24). The free thinker wants to recover the content of religion but never considers that religion might in fact contain man's basest forces, forces which we might want to leave behind. This is why we can have no confidence in the free thinker's atheism, even when he's a democrat and a socialist: "It is the church, and not its poison that repels us" (GM I 9 p. 36). The essential characteristics of the free thinker's positivism and humanism are fatalism, interpretative impotence and ignorance of the qualities of force. As soon as something appears as a human force or fact the free thinker applauds it without wondering whether this force is of base extraction, whether this fact is the opposite of a high fact: "Human all-too human". Because it does not take the qualities of forces into account free thought is, by vocation, at the service of reactive forces and expresses their triumph. For the fact is always something used by the weak against the strong; "the fact is always stupid, having at all times resembled a calf rather than a god" (UM II "Use and Abuse of History" 8). Nietzsche opposes the free spirit to the free thinker, the spirit of interpretation itself which judges forces from the standpoint of their origin and quality: "There are no facts, nothing but interpretations" (VP II 133). The critique of the free thinker is a fundamental theme in Nietzsche's work — because this critique discloses a perspective from which many different ideologies can be attacked at once; positivism, humanism, the dialectic — positivism's taste for facts, humanism's exaltation of the human fact and the dialectic's mania for recovering human contents.
In Nietzsche the word hierarchy has two senses. It signifies, firstly, the difference between active and reactive forces, the superiority of active to reactive forces. Nietzsche can thus speak of an "unalterable and innate order of rank in hierarchy" (BGE 263); and the problem of hierarchy itself is the problem of free spirits (HH Preface 7). But hierarchy also designates the triumph of reactive forces, the contagion of reactive forces and the complex organisation which results — where the weak have conquered, where the strong are contaminated, where the slave who has not stopped being a slave prevails over the master who has stopped being one: the reign of law and of virtue. In this second sense morality and religion are still theories of hierarchy (VP III 385 and 391). If we compare the two senses we see that the second is like the reverse of the first. We make Church, morality and State the masters or keepers of all hierarchy. We have the hierarchy that we deserve, we who are essentially reactive, we who take the triumphs of reaction for a transformation of action and slaves for new masters — we who only recognize hierarchy back to front.
What Nietzsche calls weak or slavish is not the least strong but that which, whatever its strength, is separated from what it can do. The least strong is as strong as the strong if he goes to the limit, because the cunning, the subtlety, the wit and even the charm by which he makes up for his lesser strength are part of this strength so that it is no longer the least. (Zarathustra's two animals are the eagle and the serpent. The eagle is strong and proud but the serpent being crafty and charming is no less strong.) The measure of forces and their qualification does not depend on absolute quantity but rather on relative accomplishment. Strength or weakness cannot be judged by taking the result and success of struggle as criterion. For, once again, it is a fact that the weak triumph: it is even the essence of fact. Forces can only be judged if one takes into account in the first place their active or reactive quality, in the second place the affinity of this quality for the corresponding pole of the will to power (affirmative or negative) and in the third place the nuance of quality that the force presents at a particular moment of its development, in relation to its affinity. Thus reactive force is: 1) utilitarian force of adaptation and partial limitation; 2) force which separates active force from what it can do, which denies active force (triumph of the weak or the slaves); 3) force separated from what it can do, which denies or turns against itself (reign of the weak or of slaves). And, an*logously, active force is: 1) plastic, dominant and subjugating force; 2) force which goes to the limit of what it can do; 3) force which affirms its difference, which makes its difference an object of enjoyment and affirmation. Forces are only concretely and completely determined if these three pairs of characteristics are taken into account simultaneously.