Waes hael friends,
I am sorry for long time no post. Of late, I have been a subterranean man— digging, mining, undermining, scurrying in the shadows, scribbling in the glow of a little red lamp. I have been working on a large book project which has consumed all of my free time, but I am now in the proofing stage, and the end draws nigh. More soon.
Today, I wanted to share an essay by Georg Brandes: “Nietzsche: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism.” I posted the Gutenberg link to this piece a few weeks ago on my twatter, but I think it is better to post here with a nice picture and a more congenial UI.
Brandes was a Danish scholar who first became acquainted with Nietzsche’s writings around 1883. When Nietzsche learned that Brandes had been making eager inquiries about his work, he had his publisher mail Brandes a copy of “Beyond Good and Evil” and “The Genealogy of Morals.” In response, Brandes penned a note of thanks to the author in the fall of 1887:
I hope by degrees to read everything of yours very carefully. This time I feel that I must express my sincere thanks to you for your gift. I consider it an honour to be known by you, and to be so known that you wish to win me for a reader. Your books bring me in touch with a new and original mind. I do not yet altogether understand what I have read, nor do I exactly grasp your drift. But there is a great deal at first sight with which my own views are in sympathy, such as the underrating of ascetic ideals, the deeply rooted aversion to democratic mediocrity, and your aristocratic radicalism. Your scorn of a morality of pity is not yet quite clear to me; nor was my line of thought completely at one with yours in your generalisations on Woman as a whole in the other book. You and I are so differently constituted that I experience some difficulty in getting at the back of your thought. In spite of your universality, you are very German in your method of thinking and writing. You are one of the few people with whom I should enjoy a talk.
I know nothing of you personally. I am astonished to see that you are a Professor and Doctor, and I congratulate you on being intellectually so little of the professor.
And thus began a friendship that lasted for the rest of Nietzsche’s productive life. “I can truly say,” Nietzsche’s sister later remarked, “that these letters were the one bright spot in my brother’s life during the winter of 1887 and 1888. I never hear the name of Georg Brandes without tears of gratitude springing to my eyes. It was just when my brother was in absolute despair of finding anyone who would take him seriously or understand what he meant for the world that Brandes, through his letters and even more through his lectures at the University of Copenhagen, showed that there was one man at least who was aware of the value and importance of this new philosophy and felt the strong necessity of bringing it to the notice of others.”
As Brandes notes, this essay on Aristocratic Radicalism was “the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries.” Among its many strengths, the essay is largely free from psychoanalytic deconstruction, it conceives of Nietzsche’s project in terms Nietzsche himself endorsed (“The expression ‘aristocratic radicalism,’ which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself,”—Nietzsche, Dec. 2, 1887), and it is eminently readable and engaging. To this day, it is surely one of the finest discourses on Nietzsche and serves as an excellent introduction to his thought, especially for the uninitiated.
With all that said, enjoy the essay by friend Georg.
An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism
by Georg Brandes
(1889)1
Friedrich Nietzsche appears to me the most interesting writer in German literature at the present time. Though little known even in his own country, he is a thinker of a high order, who fully deserves to be studied, discussed, contested and mastered. Among many good qualities he has that of imparting his mood to others and setting their thoughts in motion.
During a period of eighteen years Nietzsche has written a long series of books and pamphlets. Most of these volumes consist of aphorisms, and of these the greater part, as well as the more original, are concerned with moral prejudices. In this province will be found his lasting importance. But besides this he has dealt with the most varied problems; he has written on culture and history, on art and women, on companionship and solitude, on the State and society, on life's struggle and death.
He was born on October 15, 1844; studied philology; became in 1869 professor of philology at Basle; made the acquaintance of Richard Wagner and became warmly attached to him, and associated also with the distinguished historian of the Renaissance, Jakob Burkhardt. Nietzsche's admiration and affection for Burkhardt were lasting. His feeling for Wagner, on the other hand, underwent a complete revulsion in the course of years. From having been Wagner's prophet he developed into his most passionate opponent.
Nietzsche was always heart and soul a musician; he even tried his hand as a composer in his Hymn to Life (for chorus and orchestra, 1888), and his intercourse with Wagner left deep traces in his earliest writings. But the opera of Parsifal, with its tendency to Catholicism and its advancement of the ascetic ideals which had previously been entirely foreign to Wagner, caused Nietzsche to see in the great composer a danger, an enemy, a morbid phenomenon, since this last work showed him all the earlier operas in a new light.
During his residence in Switzerland Nietzsche came to know a large circle of interesting people. He suffered, however, from extremely severe headaches, so frequent that they incapacitated him for about two hundred days in the year and brought him to the verge of the grave. In 1879 he resigned his professorship. From 1882 to 1888 his state of health improved, though extremely slowly. His eyes were still so weak that he was threatened with blindness. He was compelled to be extremely careful in his mode of life and to choose his place of residence in obedience to climatic and meteorological conditions. He usually spent the winter at Nice and the summer at Sils-Maria in the Upper Engadine. The years 1887 and 1888 were astonishingly rich in production; they saw the publication of the most remarkable works of widely different nature and the preparation of a whole series of new books. Then, at the close of the latter year, perhaps as the result of overstrain, a violent attack of mental disorder occurred, from which Nietzsche never recovered.
As a thinker his starting-point is Schopenhauer; in his first books he is actually his disciple. But, after several years of silence, during which he passes through his first intellectual crisis, he reappears emancipated from all ties of discipleship. He then undergoes so powerful and rapid a development—less in his thought itself than in the courage to express his thoughts—that each succeeding book marks a fresh stage, until by degrees he concentrates himself upon a single fundamental question, the question of moral values. On his earliest appearance as a thinker he had already entered a protest, in opposition to David Strauss, against any moral interpretation of the nature of the Cosmos and assigned to our morality its place in the world of phenomena, now as semblance or error, now as artificial arrangement. And his literary activity reached its highest point in an investigation of the origin of the moral concepts, while it was his hope and intention to give to the world an exhaustive criticism of moral values, an examination of the value of these values (regarded as fixed once for all). The first book of his work, The Transvaluation of all Values, was completed when his malady declared itself.
1.
Nietzsche first received a good deal of notice, though not much commendation, for a caustic and juvenile polemical pamphlet against David Strauss, occasioned by the latter's book, The Old Faith and the New. His attack, irreverent in tone, is directed not against the first, warlike section of the book, but against the constructive and complementary section. The attack, however, is less concerned with the once great critic's last effort than with the mediocracy in Germany, to which Strauss's last word represented the last word of culture in general.
A year and a half had elapsed since the close of the Franco-German War. Never had the waves of German self esteem run so high. The exultation of victory had passed into a tumultuous self-glorification. The universal view was that German culture had vanquished French. Then this voice made itself heard, saying—
Admitting that this was really a conflict between two civilisations, there would still be no reason for crowning the victorious one; we should first have to know what the vanquished one was worth; if its value was very slight—and this is what is said of French culture—then there was no great honour in the victory. But in the next place there can be no question at all in this case of a victory of German culture; partly because French culture still persists, and partly because the Germans, now as heretofore, are dependent on it. It was military discipline, natural bravery, endurance, superiority on the part of the leaders and obedience on the part of the led, in short, factors that have nothing to do with culture, which gave Germany the victory. But finally and above all, German culture was not victorious for the good reason that Germany as yet has nothing that can be called culture.
It was then only a year since Nietzsche himself had formed the greatest expectations of Germany's future, had looked forward to her speedy liberation from the leading-strings of Latin civilisation, and heard the most favourable omens in German music.2 The intellectual decline, which seemed to him—rightly, no doubt—to date indisputably from the foundation of the Empire, now made him oppose a ruthless defiance to the prevailing popular sentiment.
He maintains that culture shows itself above all else in a unity of artistic style running through every expression of a nation's life. On the other hand, the fact of having learnt much and knowing much is, as he points out, neither a necessary means to culture nor a sign of culture; it accords remarkably well with barbarism, that is to say, with want of style or a motley hotchpotch of styles. And his contention is simply this, that with a culture consisting of hotchpotch it is impossible to subdue any enemy, above all an enemy like the French, who have long possessed a genuine and productive culture, whether we attribute a greater or a lesser value to it.
He appeals to a saying of Goethe to Eckermann: "We Germans are of yesterday. No doubt in the last hundred years we have been cultivating ourselves quite diligently, but it may take a few centuries yet before our countrymen have absorbed sufficient intellect and higher culture for it to be said of them that it is a long time since they were barbarians."
To Nietzsche, as we see, the concepts of culture and homogeneous culture are equivalent. In order to be homogeneous a culture must have reached a certain age and have become strong enough in its peculiar character to have penetrated all forms of life. Homogeneous culture, however, is of course not the same thing as native culture. Ancient Iceland had a homogeneous culture, though its flourishing was brought about precisely by active intercourse with Europe; a homogeneous culture existed in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, in England in the sixteenth, in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although Italy built up her culture of Greek, Roman and Spanish impressions, France hers of classical, Celtic, Spanish and Italian elements, and although the English are the mixed race beyond all others. True, it is only a century and a half since the Germans began to liberate themselves from French culture, and hardly more than a hundred years since they entirely escaped from the Frenchmen's school, whose influence may nevertheless be traced even to-day: but still no one can justly deny the existence of a German culture, even if it is yet comparatively young and in a state of growth. Nor will any one who has a sense for the agreement between German music and German philosophy, an ear for the harmony between German music and German lyrical poetry, an eye for the merits and defects of German painting and sculpture, which are the outcome of the same fundamental tendency that is revealed in the whole intellectual and emotional life of Germany, be disposed in advance to deny Germany a homogeneous culture. More precarious will be the state of such smaller countries whose dependence on foreign nations has not unfrequently been a dependence raised to the second power.
To Nietzsche, however, this point is of relatively small importance. He is convinced that the last hour of national cultures is at hand, since the time cannot be far off when it will only be a question of a European or European-American culture. He argues from the fact that the most highly developed people in every country already feel as Europeans, as fellow-countrymen, nay, as confederates, and from the belief that the twentieth century must bring with it the war for the dominion of the world.
When, therefore, from the result of this war a tempestuous wind sweeps over all national vanities, bending and breaking them, what will then be the question?
The question will then be, thinks Nietzsche, in exact agreement with the most eminent Frenchmen of our day, whether by that time it has been possible to train or rear a sort of caste of pre-eminent spirits who will be able to grasp the central power.
The real misfortune is, therefore, not that a country is still without a genuine, homogeneous and perfected culture, but that it thinks itself cultured. And with his eye upon Germany Nietzsche asks how it has come about that so prodigious a contradiction can exist as that between the lack of true culture and the self-satisfied belief in actually possessing the only true one—and he finds the answer in the circumstance that a class of men has come to the front which no former century has known, and to which (in 1873) he gave the name of "Culture-Philistines."
The Culture-Philistine regards his own impersonal education as the real culture; if he has been told that culture presupposes a homogeneous stamp of mind, he is confirmed in his good opinion of himself, since everywhere he meets with educated people of his own sort, and since schools, universities and academies are adapted to his requirements and fashioned on the model corresponding to his cultivation. Since he finds almost everywhere the same tacit conventions with respect to religion, morality and literature, with respect to marriage, the family, the community and the State, he considers it demonstrated that this imposing homogeneity is culture. It never enters his head that this systematic and well-organised philistinism, which is set up in all high places and installed at every editorial desk, is not by any means made culture just because its organs are in concert. It is not even bad culture, says Nietzsche; it is barbarism fortified to the best of its ability, but entirely lacking the freshness and savage force of original barbarism; and he has many graphic expressions to describe Culture-Philistinism as the morass in which all weariness is stuck fast, and in the poisonous mists of which all endeavour languishes.
All of us are now born into the society of cultured philistinism, in it we all grow up. It confronts us with prevailing opinions, which we unconsciously adopt; and even when opinions are divided, the division is only into party opinions—public opinions.
An aphorism of Nietzsche's reads: "What is public opinion? It is private indolence." The dictum requires qualification. There are cases where public opinion is worth something: John Morley has written a good book on the subject. In the face of certain gross breaches of faith and law, certain monstrous violations of human rights, public opinion may now and then assert itself as a power worthy to be followed. Otherwise it is as a rule a factory working for the benefit of Culture-Philistinism.
On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him: "Become thyself! Be thyself!" he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it.
He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.
We had in Denmark a great man who with impressive force exhorted his contemporaries to become individuals. But Sören Kierkegaard's appeal was not intended to be taken so unconditionally as it sounded. For the goal was fixed. They were to become individuals, not in order to develop into free personalities, but in order by this means to become true Christians. Their freedom was only apparent; above them was suspended a "Thou shalt believe!" and a "Thou shalt obey!" Even as individuals they had a halter round their necks, and on the farther side of the narrow passage of individualism, through which the herd was driven, the herd awaited them again—one flock, one shepherd.
It is not with this idea of immediately resigning his personality again that the young man in our day desires to become himself and seeks an educator. He will not have a dogma set up before him, at which he is expected to arrive. But he has an uneasy feeling that he is packed with dogmas. How is he to find himself in himself, how is he to dig himself out of himself? This is where the educator should help him. An educator can only be a liberator.
It was a liberating educator of this kind that Nietzsche as a young man looked for and found in Schopenhauer. Such a one will be found by every seeker in the personality that has the most liberating effect on him during his period of development. Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.
It is true that for Nietzsche, as for any other aspirant, there remained one more step to be taken, that of liberating himself from the liberator. We find in his earliest writings certain favourite expressions of Schopenhauer's which no longer appear in his later works. But the liberation is here a tranquil development to independence, throughout which he retains his deep gratitude; not, as in his relations with Wagner, a violent revulsion which leads him to deny any value to the works he had once regarded as the most valuable of all.
He praises Schopenhauer's lofty honesty, beside which he can only place Montaigne's, his lucidity, his constancy, and the purity of his relations with society, State and State-religion, which are in such sharp contrast with those of Kant. With Schopenhauer there is never a concession, never a dallying.
And Nietzsche is astounded by the fact that Schopenhauer could endure life in Germany at all. A modern Englishman has said: "Shelley could never have lived in England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible." Spirits of this kind are early broken, then become melancholy, morbid or insane. The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men. Examples of this occur in plenty in the literature of every country, and the trial is constantly being made. We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist. But even in the strongest the vain and weary struggle with Culture-Philistinism shows itself in lines and wrinkles. Nietzsche quotes the saying of the old diplomatist, who had only casually seen and spoken to Goethe: "Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins," and Goethe's comment, when repeating it to his friends: "If the traces of our sufferings and activities are indelible even in our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same marks." And this is Goethe, who is looked upon as the favourite of fortune!
Schopenhauer, as is well known, was until his latest years a solitary man. No one understood him, no one read him. The greater part of the first edition of his work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, had to be sold as waste paper.
In our day Taine's view has widely gained ground, that the great man is entirely determined by the age whose child he is, that he unconsciously sums it up and ought consciously to give it expression.3 But although, of course, the great man does not stand outside the course of history and must always depend upon predecessors, an idea nevertheless always germinates in a single individual or in a few individuals; and these individuals are not scattered points in the low-lying mass, but highly gifted ones who draw the mass to them instead of being drawn by it. What is called the spirit of the age originates in quite a small number of brains.
Nietzsche who, mainly no doubt through Schopenhauer's influence, had originally been strongly impressed by the dictum that the great man is not the child of his age but its step-child, demands that the educator shall help the young to educate themselves in opposition to the age.
It appears to him that the modern age has produced for imitation three particular types of man, one after the other. First Rousseau's man; the Titan who raises himself, oppressed and bound by the higher castes, and in his need calls upon holy Nature. Then Goethe's man; not Werther or the revolutionary figures related to him, who are still derived from Rousseau, nor the original Faust figure, but Faust as he gradually develops. He is no liberator, but a spectator, of the world. He is not the man of action. Nietzsche reminds us of Jarno's words to Wilhelm Meister: "You are vexed and bitter, that is a very good thing. If you could be thoroughly angry for once, it would be better still."
To become thoroughly angry in order to make things better, this, in the view of the Nietzsche of thirty, will be the exhortation of Schopenhauer's man. This man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth. His fundamental idea is this: A life of happiness is impossible; the highest a man can attain to is a heroic life, one in which he fights against the greatest difficulties for something which, in one way or another, will be for the good of all. To what is truly human, only true human beings can raise us; those who seem to have come into being by a leap in Nature; thinkers and educators, artists and creators, and those who influence us more by their nature than by their activity: the noble, the good in a grand style, those in whom the genius of good is at work.
These men are the aim of history.
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.
Yet, although the idea does not lack advocates, this does not make it a dominant thought in European philosophy. In Germany, for instance, Eduard von Hartmann thinks very differently of the aim—of history. His published utterances on the subject are well known. In conversation he once hinted how his idea had originated in his mind: "It was clear to me long ago," he said, "that history, or, to use a wider expression, the world process, must have an aim, and that this aim could only be negative. For a golden age is too foolish a figment." Hence his visions of a destruction of the world voluntarily brought about by the most gifted men. And connected with this is his doctrine that humanity has now reached man's estate, that is, has passed the stage of development in which geniuses were necessary.
In the face of all this talk of the world process, the aim of which is annihilation or deliverance—deliverance even of the suffering godhead from existence—Nietzsche takes a very sober and sensible stand with his simple belief that the goal of humanity is not to be infinitely deferred, but must be found in the highest examples of humanity itself.
And herewith he has arrived at his final answer to the question, What is culture? For upon this relation depend the fundamental idea of culture and the duties culture imposes. It imposes on me the duty of associating myself by my own activity with the great human ideals. Its fundamental idea is this: it assigns to every individual who wishes to work for it and participate in it, the task of striving to produce, within and without himself, the thinker and artist, the lover of truth and beauty, the pure and good personality, and thereby striving for the perfection of Nature, towards the goal of a perfected Nature.
When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.
But does such a state exist? perhaps some one will ask. Most of the smaller nations will be able to read the answer in the history of their native land. It will there be seen, in proportion as "refinement" grows, that the refined atmosphere is diffused, which is unfavourable to genius. And this is all the more serious, since many people think that in modern times and in the races which now share the dominion of the world among them, a political community of only a few millions is seldom sufficiently numerous to produce minds of the very first order. It looks as if geniuses could only be distilled from some thirty or forty millions of people. Norway with Ibsen, Belgium with Maeterlinck and Verhaeren are exceptions. All the more reason is there for the smaller communities to work at culture to their utmost capacity.
In recent times we have become familiar with the thought that the goal to be aimed at is happiness, the happiness of all, or at any rate of the greatest number. Wherein happiness consists is less frequently discussed, and yet it is impossible to avoid the question, whether a year, a day, an hour in Paradise does not bring more happiness than a lifetime in the chimney-corner. But be that as it may: owing to our familiarity with the notion of making sacrifices for a whole country, a multitude of people, it appears unreasonable that a man should exist for the sake of a few other men, that it should be his duty to devote his life to them in order thereby to promote culture. But nevertheless the answer to the question of culture—how the individual human life may acquire its highest value and its greatest significance—must be: By being lived for the benefit of the rarest and most valuable examples of the human race. This will also be the way in which the individual can best impart a value to the life of the greatest number.
In our day a so-called cultural institution means an organisation in virtue of which the "cultured" advance in serried ranks and thrust aside all solitary and obstinate men whose efforts are directed to higher ends; therefore even the learned are as a rule lacking in any sense for budding genius and any feeling for the value of struggling contemporary genius. Therefore, in spite of the indisputable and restless progress in all technical and specialised departments, the conditions necessary to the appearance of great men are so far from having improved, that dislike of genius has rather increased than diminished.
From the State the exceptional individual cannot expect much. He is seldom benefited by being taken into its service; the only certain advantage it can give him is complete independence. Only real culture will prevent his being too early tired out or used up, and will spare him the exhausting struggle against Culture-Philistinism.
Nietzsche's value lies in his being one of these vehicles of culture: a mind which, itself independent, diffuses independence and may become to others a liberating force, such as Schopenhauer was to Nietzsche himself in his younger days.
2.
Four of Nietzsche's early works bear the collective title, Thoughts out of Season (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), a title which is significant of his early-formed determination to go against the stream.
One of the fields in which he opposed the spirit of the age in Germany is that of education, since he condemns in the most uncompromising fashion the entire historical system of education of which Germany is proud, and which as a rule is everywhere regarded as desirable.
His view is that what keeps the race from breathing freely and willing boldly is that it drags far too much of its past about with it, like a round-shot chained to a convict's leg. He thinks it is historical education that fetters the race both in enjoyment and in action, since he who cannot concentrate himself on the moment and live entirely in it, can neither feel happiness himself nor do anything to make others happy. Without the power of feeling unhistorically, there is no happiness. And in the same way, forgetfulness, or rather, non-knowledge of the past is essential to all action. Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is as it were the enveloping air, the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist—and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished. Now answering to this, says Nietzsche, there exists a certain degree of historical knowledge which is destructive of a man's energy and fatal to the productive powers of a nation.
In this reasoning we can hear the voice of the learned German philologist, whose observations have mostly been drawn from German scholars and artists. For it would be unreasonable to suppose that the commercial or peasant class, the soldiers or manufacturers of Germany suffered from an excess of historical culture. But even in the case of German savants, authors and artists the evil here pointed out may be of such a nature as not to admit of remedy by simply abolishing historical education. Those men whose productive impulse has been checked or killed by historical studies were already so impotent and ineffective that the world would not have been enriched by their productions. And moreover, what paralyses is not so much the heterogeneous mass of dead historical learning (about the actions of governments, political chess-moves, military achievements, artistic styles, etc.), as the knowledge of certain great minds of the past, by the side of whose production anything that can be shown by a man now living appears so insignificant as to make it a matter of indifference whether his work sees the light or not. Goethe alone is enough to reduce a young German poet to despair. But a hero-worshipper like Nietzsche cannot consistently desire to curtail our knowledge of the greatest.
The want of artistic courage and intellectual boldness has certainly deeper-lying causes; above all, the disintegration of the individuality which the modern order of society involves. Strong men can carry a heavy load of history without becoming incapacitated for living.
But what is interesting and significant of Nietzsche's whole intellectual standpoint is his inquiry as to how far life is able to make use of history. History, in his view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through milleniums, could not stand clearly and vividly before me. When one sees, that it only took about a hundred men to bring in the culture of the Renaissance; it may easily be supposed, for example, that a hundred productive minds, trained in a new style, would be enough to make an end of Culture-Philistinism. On the other hand, history may have pernicious effects in the hands of unproductive men. Thus young artists are driven into galleries instead of out into nature, and are sent, with minds still unformed, to centres of art, where they lose courage. And in all its forms history may render men unfit for life; in its monumental form by evoking the illusion that there are such things as fixed, recurring historical conjunctions, so that what has once been possible is now, in entirely altered conditions, possible again; in its antiquarian form by awakening a feeling of piety for ancient, bygone things, which paralyses the man of action, who must always outrage some piety or other; finally in its critical form by giving rise to the depressing feeling that the very errors of the past, which we are striving to overcome, are inherited in our blood and impressed on our childhood, so that we live in a continual inner conflict between an old and a new nature.
On this point, as on others already alluded to, Nietzsche's quarrel is ultimately with the broken-winded education of the present day. That education and historical education have in our time almost become synonymous terms, is to him a mournful sign. It has been irretrievably forgotten that culture ought to be what it was with the Greeks: a motive, a prompting to resolution; nowadays culture is commonly described as inwardness, because it is a dead internal lump, which does not stir its possessor. The most "educated" people are walking encyclopædias. When they act, they do so in virtue of a universally approved, miserable convention, or else from simple barbarism.
With this reflection, no doubt of general application, is connected a complaint which was bound to be evoked by modern literary Germany in particular; the complaint of the oppressive effect of the greatness of former times, as shown in the latter-day man's conviction that he is a latecomer, an after-birth of a greater age, who may indeed teach himself history, but can never produce it.
Even philosophy, Nietzsche complains, with a side-glance at the German universities, has been more and more transformed into the history of philosophy, a teaching of what everybody has thought about everything; "a sort of harmless gossip between academic grey-beards and academic sucklings." It is boasted as a point of honour that freedom of thought exists in various countries. In reality it is only a poor sort of freedom. One may think in a hundred ways, but one may only act in one way—and that is the way that is called "culture" and is in reality "only a form, and what is more a bad form, a uniform."
Nietzsche attacks the view which regards the historically cultured person as the justest of all. We honour the historian who aims at pure knowledge, from which nothing follows. But there are many trivial truths, and it is a misfortune that whole battalions of inquirers should fling themselves upon them, even if these narrow minds belong to honest men. The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.
As historical education is now conducted, the mass of impressions communicated is so great as to produce numbness, a feeling of being born old of an old stock—although less than thirty human lives, reckoned at seventy years each, divide us from the beginning of our era. And with this is connected the immense superstition of the value and significance of universal history. Schiller's phrase is everlastingly repeated: "The history of the world is the tribunal of the world," as though there could be any other historical tribunal than thought; and the Hegelian view of history as the ever-clearer self-revelation of the godhead has obstinately held its own, only that it has gradually passed into sheer admiration of success, an approval of any and every fact, be it never so brutal. But greatness has nothing to do with results or with success. Demosthenes, who spoke in vain, is greater than Philip, who was always victorious. Everything in our day is thought to be in order, if only it be an accomplished fact; even when a man of genius dies in the fulness of his powers, proofs are forthcoming that he died at the right time. And the fragment of history we possess is entitled "the world process"; men cudgel their brains, like Eduard von Hartmann, in trying to find out its origin and final goal—which seems to be a waste of time. Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Sören Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.
Significant of Nietzsche's aristocratic tendency, so marked later, is his anger with the deference paid by modern historians to the masses. Formerly, he argues, history was written from the standpoint of the rulers; it was occupied exclusively with them, however mediocre or bad they might be. Now it has crossed over to the standpoint of the masses. But the masses—they are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools. Otherwise they are matter for statisticians to deal with, who find so-called historical laws in the instincts of the masses—aping, laziness, hunger and sexual impulse. What has set the mass in motion for any length of time is then called great. It is given the name of a historical power. When, for example, the vulgar mob has appropriated or adapted to its needs some religious idea, has defended it stubbornly and dragged it along for centuries, then the originator of that idea is called great. There is the testimony of thousands of years for it, we are told. But—this is Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's idea—the noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder's greatness rather than for it.
When an instance is required of one of the few enterprises in history that have been completely successful, the Reformation is commonly chosen. Against the significance of this success Nietzsche does not urge the facts usually quoted: its early secularisation by Luther; his compromises with those in power; the interest of princes in emancipating themselves from the mastery of the Church and laying hands on its estates, while at the same time securing a submissive and dependent clergy instead of one independent of the State. He sees the chief cause of the success of the Reformation in the uncultured state of the nations of northern Europe. Many attempts at founding new Greek religions came to naught in antiquity. Although men like Pythagoras, Plato, perhaps Empedocles, had qualifications as founders of religions, the individuals they had to deal with were far too diversified in their nature to be helped by a common doctrine of faith and hope. In contrast with this, the success of Luther's Reformation in the North was an indication that northern culture was behind that of southern Europe. The people either blindly obeyed a watchword from above, like a flock of sheep; or, where conversion was a matter of conscience, it revealed how little individuality there was among a population which was found to be so homogeneous in its spiritual needs. In the same way, too, the original conversion of pagan antiquity was only successful on account of the abundant intermixture of barbarian with Roman blood which had taken place. The new doctrine was forced upon the masters of the world by barbarians and slaves.
The reader now has examples of the arguments Nietzsche employs in support of his proposition that history is not so sound and strengthening an educational factor as is thought: only he who has learnt to know life and is equipped for action has use for history and is capable of applying it; others are oppressed by it and rendered unproductive by being made to feel themselves late-comers, or are induced to worship success in every field.
Nietzsche's contribution to this question is a plea against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts—of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks. He has developed this view in the learned and profound work of his youth, The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism, in which he introduced two new terms, Apollonian and Dionysian. The two Greek deities of art, Apollo and Dionysus, denote the antithesis between plastic art and music. The former corresponds to dreaming, the latter to drunkenness. In dreams the forms of the gods first appeared to men; dreams are the world of beauteous appearance. If, on the other hand, we look down into man's lowest depths, below the spheres of thought and imagination, we come upon a world of terror and rapture, the realm of Dionysus. Above reign beauty, measure and proportion; but underneath the profusion of Nature surges freely in pleasure and pain. Regarded from Nietzsche's later standpoint, the deeper motive of this searching absorption in Hellenic antiquity becomes apparent. Even at this early stage he suspects, in what passes for morality, a disparaging principle directed against Nature; he looks for its essential antithesis, and finds it in the purely artistic principle, farthest removed from Christianity, which he calls Dionysian.
Our author's main psychological features are now clearly apparent. What kind of a nature is it that carries this savage hatred of philistinism even as far as to David Strauss? An artist's nature, obviously. What kind of a writer is it who warns us with such firm conviction against the dangers of historical culture? A philologist obviously, who has experienced them in himself, has felt himself threatened with becoming a mere aftermath and tempted to worship historical success. What kind of a nature is it that so passionately defines culture as the worship of genius? Certainly no Eckermann-nature, but an enthusiast, willing at the outset to obey where he cannot command, but quick to recognise his own masterful bias, and to see that humanity is far from having outgrown the ancient antithetical relation of commanding and obeying. The appearance of Napoleon is to him, as to many others, a proof of this; in the joy that thrilled thousands, when at last they saw one who knew how to command.
But in the sphere of ethics he is not disposed to preach obedience. On the contrary, constituted as he is, he sees the apathy and meanness of our modern morality in the fact that it still upholds obedience as the highest moral commandment, instead of the power of dictating to one's self one's own morality.
His military schooling and participation in the war of 1870-71 probably led to his discovery of a hard and manly quality in himself, and imbued him with an extreme abhorrence of all softness and effeminacy. He turned aside with disgust from the morality of pity in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from the romantic-catholic element in Wagner's music, to both of which he had previously paid homage. He saw that he had transformed both masters according to his own needs, and he understood quite well the instinct of self preservation that was here at work. The aspiring mind creates the helpers it requires. Thus he afterwards dedicated his book, Human, all-too-Human, which was published on Voltaire's centenary, to the "free spirits" among his contemporaries; his dreams created the associates that he had not yet found in the flesh.
The severe and painful illness, which began in his thirty-second year and long made him a recluse, detached him from all romanticism and freed his heart from all bonds of piety. It carried him far away from pessimism, in virtue of his proud thought that "a sufferer has no right to pessimism." This illness made a philosopher of him in a strict sense. His thoughts stole inquisitively along forbidden paths: This thing passes for a value. Can we not turn it upside-down? This is regarded as good. Is it not rather evil?—Is not God refuted? But can we say as much of the devil?—Are we not deceived? and deceived deceivers, all of us?...
And then out of this long sickliness arises a passionate desire for health, the joy of the convalescent in life, in light, in warmth, in freedom and ease of mind, in the range and horizon of thought, in "visions of new dawns," in creative capacity, in poetical strength. And he enters upon the lofty self-confidence and ecstasy of a long uninterrupted production.
3.
It is neither possible nor necessary to review here the long series of his writings. In calling attention to an author who is still unread, one need only throw his most characteristic thoughts and expressions into relief, so that the reader with little trouble may form an idea of his way of thinking and quality of mind. The task is here rendered difficult by Nietzsche's thinking in aphorisms, and facilitated by his habit of emphasising every thought in such a way as to give it a startling appearance.
English utilitarianism has met with little acceptance in Germany; among more eminent contemporary thinkers Eugen Dühring is its chief advocate; Friedrich Paulsen also sides with the Englishmen. Eduard von Hartmann has attempted to demonstrate the impossibility of simultaneously promoting culture and happiness. Nietzsche finds new difficulties in an analysis of the concept of happiness. The object of utilitarianism is to procure humanity as much pleasure and as little of the reverse as possible. But what if pleasure and pain are so intertwined that he who wants all the pleasure he can get must take a corresponding amount of suffering into the bargain? Clärchen's song contains the words: "Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt" Who knows whether the latter is not the condition of the former? The Stoics believed this, and, wishing to avoid pain, asked of life the minimum of pleasure. Probably it is equally unwise in our day to promise men intense joys, if they are to be insured against great sufferings.
We see that Nietzsche transfers the question to the highest spiritual plane, without regard to the fact that the lowest and commonest misfortunes, such as hunger, physical exhaustion, excessive and unhealthy labour, yield no compensation in violent joys. Even if all pleasure be dearly bought, it does not follow that all pain is interrupted and counterbalanced by intense enjoyment.
In accordance with his aristocratic bias he then attacks Bentham's proposition: the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. The ideal was, of course, to procure happiness for everybody; as this could not be done, the formula took the above shape. But why happiness for the greatest number? We might imagine it for the best, the noblest, the most gifted; and we may be permitted to ask whether moderate prosperity and moderate well-being are preferable to the inequality of lot which acts as a goad, forcing culture ever upward.
Then there is the doctrine of unselfishness. To be moral is to be unselfish. It is good to be so, we are told. But what does that mean—good? Good for whom? Not for the self-sacrificer, but for his neighbour. He who praises the virtue of unselfishness, praises something that is good for the community but harmful to the individual. And the neighbour who wants to be loved unselfishly is not himself unselfish. The fundamental contradiction in this morality is that it demands and commends a renunciation of the ego, for the benefit of another ego.
At the outset the essential and invaluable element of all morality is, in Nietzsche's view, simply this, that it is a prolonged constraint. As language gains in strength and freedom by the constraint of verse, and as all the freedom and delicacy to be found in plastic art, music and dancing is the result of arbitrary laws, so also does human nature only attain its development under constraint. No violence is thereby done to Nature; this is the very nature of things.
The essential point is that there should be obedience, for a long time and in the same direction. Thou shalt obey, some one or something, and for a long time—otherwise thou wilt come to grief; this seems to be the moral imperative of Nature, which is certainly neither categorical (as Kant thought), nor addressed to the individual (Nature does not trouble about the individual), but seems to be addressed to nations, classes, periods, races—in fact, to mankind. On the other hand, all the morality that is addressed to the individual for his own good, for the sake of his own welfare, is reduced in this view to mere household remedies and counsels of prudence, recipes for curbing passions that might want to break out; and all this morality is preposterous in form, because it addresses itself to all and generalises what does not admit of generalisation. Kant gave us a guiding rule with his categorical imperative. But this rule has failed us. It is of no use saying to us: Act as others ought to act in this case. For we know that there are not and cannot be such things as identical actions, but that every action is unique in its nature, so that any precept can only apply to the rough outside of actions.
But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. We can tell that the judgment of So-and-So's conscience has a past history in his instincts, his original sympathies or antipathies, his experience or want of experience. We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.
And as regards the ethical teachers' preaching of morality for all, this is every bit as empty as the gossip of individual society people about each other's morals. Nietzsche gives the moralists this good advice: that, instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person. But as a rule the moral ranters are themselves quite uneducated persons, and their children seldom rise above moral mediocrity.
He who feels that in his inmost being he cannot be compared with others, will be his own lawgiver. For one thing is needful: to give style to one's character. This art is practised by him who, with an eye for the strong and weak sides of his nature, removes from it one quality and another, and then by daily practice and acquired habit replaces them by others which become second nature to him; in other words, he puts himself under restraint in order by degrees to bend his nature entirely to his own law. Only thus does a man arrive at satisfaction with himself, and only thus does he become endurable to others. For the dissatisfied and the unsuccessful as a rule avenge themselves on others. They absorb poison from everything, from their own incompetence as well as from their poor circumstances, and they live in a constant craving for revenge on those in whose nature they suspect harmony. Such people ever have virtuous precepts on their lips; the whole jingle of morality, seriousness, chastity, the claims of life; and their hearts ever bum with envy of those who have become well balanced and can therefore enjoy life.
For millenniums morality meant obedience to custom, respect for inherited usage. The free, exceptional man was immoral, because he broke with the tradition which the others regarded with superstitious fear. Very commonly he took the same view and was himself seized by the terror he inspired. Thus a popular morality of custom was unconsciously elaborated by all who belonged to the tribe; since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment—if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudoscience on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.
Manners and customs represented the experiences of bygone generations concerning what was supposed to be useful or harmful; the sense of morality, however, does not attach to these experiences as such, but only to their age, their venerability and consequent incontestability. In the state of war in which a tribe existed in old times, threatened on every side, there was no greater gratification, under the sway of the strictest morality of custom, than cruelty. Cruelty is one of the oldest festal and triumphal joys of mankind. It was thought that the gods, too, might be gratified and festively disposed by offering them the sight of cruelties—and thus the idea insinuated itself into the world that voluntary self-torture, mortification and abstinence are also of great value, not as discipline, but as a sweet savour unto the Lord.
Christianity as a religion of the past unceasingly practised and preached the torture of souls. Imagine the state of the mediæval Christian, when he supposed he could no longer escape eternal torment. Eros and Aphrodite were in his imagination powers of hell, and death was a terror.
To the morality of cruelty has succeeded that of pity. The morality of pity is lauded as unselfish, by Schopenhauer in particular.
Eduard von Hartmann, in his thoughtful work, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (pp. 217-240), has already shown the impossibility of regarding pity as the most important of moral incentives, to say nothing of its being the only one, as Schopenhauer would have it. Nietzsche attacks the morality of pity from other points of view. He shows it to be by no means unselfish. Another's misfortune affects us painfully and offends us—perhaps brands us as cowards if we do not go to his aid. Or it contains a hint of a possible danger to ourselves; moreover, we feel joy in comparing our own state with that of the unfortunate, joy when we can step in as the stronger, the helper. The help we afford gives us a feeling of happiness, or perhaps it merely rescues us from boredom.
Pity in the form of actual fellow-suffering would be a weakness, nay, a misfortune, since it would add to the world's suffering. A man who seriously abandoned himself to sympathy with all the misery he found about him, would simply be destroyed by it.
Among savages the thought of arousing pity is regarded with horror. Those who do so are despised. According to savage notions, to feel pity for a person is to despise him; but they find no pleasure in seeing a contemptible person suffer. On the other hand, the sight of an enemy's suffering, when his pride does not forsake him in the midst of his torment—that is enjoyment, that excites admiration.
The morality of pity is often preached in the formula, love thy neighbour.
Nietzsche in the interests of his attack seizes upon the word neighbour. Not only does he demand, with Kierkegaard, a setting-aside of morality for the sake of the end in view, but he is exasperated that the true nature of morality should be held to consist in a consideration of the immediate results of our actions, to which we are to conform. To what is narrow and pettifogging in this morality he opposes another, which looks beyond these immediate results and aspires, even by means that cause our neighbour pain, to more distant objects; such as the advancement of knowledge, although this will lead to sorrow and doubt and evil passions in our neighbour. We need not on this account be without pity, but we may hold our pity captive for the sake of the object.
And as it is now unreasonable to term pity unselfish and seek to consecrate it, it is equally so to hand over a series of actions to the evil conscience, merely because they have been maligned as egotistical. What has happened in recent times in this connection is that the instinct of self-denial and self-sacrifice, everything altruistic, has been glorified as if it were the supreme value of morality.
The English moralists, who at present dominate Europe, explain the origin of ethics in the following way: Unselfish actions were originally called good by those who were their objects and who benefited by them; afterwards this original reason for praising them was forgotten, and unselfish actions came to be regarded as good in themselves.
According to a statement of Nietzsche himself it was a work by a German author with English leanings, Dr. Paul Rée's Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz, 1877), which provoked him to such passionate and detailed opposition that he had to thank this book for the impulse to clear up and develop his own ideas on the subject.
The surprising part of it, however, is this: Dissatisfaction with his first book caused Rée to write a second and far more important work on the same subject—Die Entstehung des Gewissens (Berlin, 1885)—in which the point of view offensive to Nietzsche is abandoned and several of the leading ideas advanced by the latter against Rée are set forth, supported by a mass of evidence taken from various authors and races of men.
The two philosophers were personally acquainted. I knew them both, but had no opportunity of questioning either on this matter. It is therefore impossible for me to say which of the two influenced the other, or why Nietzsche in 1887 alludes to his detestation of the opinions put forward by Rée in 1877, without mentioning how near the latter had come to his own view in the work published two years previously.
Rée had already adduced a number of examples to show that the most diverse peoples of antiquity knew no other moral classification of men than that of nobles and common people, powerful and weak; so that the oldest meaning of good both in Greece and Iceland was noble, mighty, rich. Nietzsche builds his whole theory on this foundation. His train of thought is this—
The critical word good is not due to those to whom goodness has been shown. The oldest definition was this: the noble, the mightier, higher-placed and high-minded held themselves and their actions to be good—of the first rank—in contradistinction to everything low and low-minded. Noble, in the sense of the class-consciousness of a higher caste, is the primary concept from which develops good in the sense of spiritually aristocratic. The lowly are designated as bad (not evil). Bad does not acquire its unqualified depreciatory meaning till much later. In the mouth of the people it is a laudatory word; the German word schlecht is identical with schlicht (cf. schlechtweg and schlechterdings).
The ruling caste call themselves sometimes simply the Mighty, sometimes the Truthful; like the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece Theognis was. With him beautiful, good and noble always have the sense of aristocratic. The aristocratic moral valuation proceeds from a triumphant affirmation, a yea-saying, which we find in the Homeric heroes: We, the noble, beautiful and brave—we are the good, the beloved of the gods. These are strong men, charged with force, who delight in warlike deeds, to whom, in other words, happiness is activity.
It is of course unavoidable that these nobles should misjudge and despise the plebeian herd they dominate. Yet as a rule there may be traced in them a pity for the downtrodden caste, for the drudge and beast of burden, an indulgence towards those to whom happiness is rest, the Sabbath of inactivity.
Among the lower orders, on the other hand, an image of the ruling caste distorted by hatred and spite is necessarily current. In this distortion there lies a revenge.5
In opposition to the aristocratic valuation (good = noble, beautiful, happy, favoured by the gods) the slave morality then is this: The wretched alone are the good; those who suffer and are heavy laden, the sick and the ugly, they are the only pious ones. On the other hand, you, ye noble and rich, are to all eternity the evil, the cruel, the insatiate, the ungodly, and after death the damned. Whereas noble morality was the manifestation of great self-esteem, a continual yea-saying, slave morality is a continual Nay, a Thou shalt not, a negation.
To the noble valuation good—bad (bad = worthless) corresponds the antithesis of slave morality, good—evil. And who are the evil in this morality of the oppressed? Precisely the same who in the other morality were the good.
Let any one read the Icelandic sagas and examine the morality of the ancient Northmen, and then compare with it the complaints of other nations about the vikings' misdeeds. It will be seen that these aristocrats, whose conduct in many ways stood high, were no better than beasts of prey in dealing with their enemies. They fell upon the inhabitants of Christian shores like eagles upon lambs. One may say they followed an eagle ideal. But then we cannot wonder that those who were exposed to such fearful attacks gathered round an entirely opposite moral ideal, that of the lamb.
In the third chapter of his Utilitarianism, Stuart Mill attempts to prove that the sense of justice has developed from the animal instinct of making reprisal for an injury or a loss. In an essay on "the transcendental satisfaction of the feeling of revenge" (supplement to the first edition of the Werth des Lebens) Eugen Dühring has followed him in trying to establish the whole doctrine of punishment upon the instinct of retaliation. In his Phänomenologie Eduard von Hartmann shows how this instinct strictly speaking never does more than involve a new suffering, a new offence, to gain external satisfaction for the old one, so that the principle of requital can never be any distinct principle.
Nietzsche makes a violent, passionate attempt to refer the sum total of false modern morality, not to the instinct of requital or to the feeling of revenge in general, but to the narrower form of it which we call spite, envy and rancune. What he calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction; God chastens whom he loves. Or it became a preparation, a trial and a training; even more—something that will one day be made good with interest, paid back in bliss. And the vilest underground creatures, swollen with hate and spite, were heard to say: We, the good, we are the righteous. They did not hate their enemies—they hated injustice, ungodliness. What they hoped for was not the sweets of revenge, but the victory of righteousness. Those they had left to love on earth were their brothers and sisters in hatred, whom they called their brothers and sisters in love. The future state they looked for was called the coming of their kingdom, of God's kingdom. Until it arrives they live on in faith, hope and love.
If Nietzsche's design in this picture was to strike at historical Christianity, he has given us—as any one may see—a caricature in the spirit and style of the eighteenth century. But that his description hits off a certain type of the apostles of spite-morality cannot be denied, and rarely has all the self-deception that may lurk beneath moral preaching been more vigorously unmasked. (Compare Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.)6
[5]Nietzsche supports his hypothesis by derivations, some doubtful, others incorrect; but their value is immaterial.
[6]Where Nietzsche's words are quoted, in the course of this essay, considerable use has been made of the complete English translation of his works, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.—Tr.
4.
Nietzsche would define man as an animal that can make and keep promises.
He sees the real nobility of man in his capacity for promising something, answering for himself and undertaking a responsibility—since man, with the mastery of himself which this capacity implies, necessarily acquires in addition a mastery over external circumstances and over other creatures, whose will is not so lasting.
The consciousness of this responsibility is what the sovereign man calls his conscience.
What, then, is the past history of this responsibility, this conscience? It is a long and bloody one. Frightful means have been used in the course of history to train men to remember what they have once promised or willed, tacitly or explicitly. For milleniums man was confined in the strait-jacket of the morality of custom, and by such punishments as stoning, breaking on the wheel or burning, by burying the sinner alive, tearing him asunder with horses, throwing him into the water with a stone on his neck or in a sack, by scourging, flaying and branding—by all these means a long memory for what he had promised was burnt into that forgetful animal, man; in return for which he was permitted to enjoy the advantages of being a member of society.
According to Nietzsche's hypothesis, the consciousness of guilt originates simply as consciousness of a debt. The relation of contract between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the earliest primitive forms of human intercourse in buying, selling, bartering, etc.—this is the relation that underlies it. The debtor (in order to inspire confidence in his promise of repayment) pledges something he possesses: his liberty, his woman, his life; or he gives his creditor the right of cutting a larger or smaller piece of flesh from his body, according to the amount of the debt. (The Roman Code of the Twelve Tables; again in The Merchant of Venice.)
The logic of this, which has become somewhat strange to us, is as follows: as compensation for his loss the creditor is granted a kind of voluptuous sensation, the delight of being able to exercise his power upon the powerless.
The reader may find evidence in Rée (op. cit., p. 13 ff.) for Nietzsche's dictum, that for milleniums this was the view of mankind: The sight of suffering does one good.
The infliction of suffering on another is a feast at which the fortunate one swells with the joy of power. We may also find evidence in Rée that the instincts of pity, fairness and clemency, which were afterwards glorified as virtues, were originally regarded almost everywhere as morally worthless, nay, as indications of weakness.
Buying and selling, as well as everything psychologically connected therewith and older than any form of social organisation, contain the germs, in Nietzsche's view, of compensation, assessing, justice and duty. Man soon became proud of himself as a being who measures values. One of the earliest generalisations was this: Everything has its price. And the thought that everything can be paid for was the oldest and most naïve canon of justice.
Now the whole of society, as it gradually develops, stands in the same relation to its members as the creditor to the debtor. Society protects its members; they are assured against the state of outlawry—on condition that they do not break their pledges to the community. He who breaks his word—the criminal—is relegated to the outlawry involved in exclusion from society.
As Nietzsche, who is so exclusively taken up by the psychological aspect, discards all accessories of scholarship, it is impossible to examine directly the accuracy of his assertions. The historical data will be found collected in Rée's paragraphs on resentment and the sense of justice, and in his section on the buying-off of revenge, i. e. settlement by fines.
Other thinkers besides Nietzsche (such as E. von Hartmann and Rée) have combated the view that the idea of justice has its origin in a state of resentment, and Nietzsche has scarcely brought to light any fresh and convincing proof; but what is characteristic of him as a writer is the excess of personal passion with which he attacks this view, obviously because it is connected with the reasoning of modern democracy.
In many a modern cry for justice there rings a note of plebeian spite and envy. Involuntarily many a modern savant of middle-class or lower middle-class origin has attributed an unwarrantable importance to the atavistic emotions prevalent among those who have been long oppressed: hatred and rancour, spite and thirst for revenge.
Nietzsche does not occupy himself for an instant with the state of things in which revenge does duty as the sole punitive justice; for the death feud is not a manifestation of the thrall's hatred of his master, but of ideas of honour among equals. He dwells exclusively on the contrast between a ruling caste and a caste of slaves, and shows a constantly recurring indignation with doctrines which have caused the progressive among his contemporaries to look with indulgence on the instincts of the populace and with suspicion or hostility on master spirits. His purely personal characteristic, however, the unphilosophical and temperamental in him, is revealed in the trait that, while he has nothing but scorn and contempt for the down-trodden class or race, for the slave morality resulting from its suppressed rancour, he positively revels in the ruling caste's delight in its power, in the atmosphere of healthiness, freedom, frankness and truthfulness in which it lives. Its acts of tyranny he defends or excuses. The image it creates for itself of the slave caste is to him far less falsified than that which the latter forms of the master caste.
Nor can there be serious question of any real injustice committed by this caste. For there is no such thing as right or wrong in itself. The infliction of an injury, forcible subjection, exploitation or annihilation is not in itself a wrong, cannot be such, since life in its essence, in its primary functions, is nothing but oppression, exploitation and annihilation. Conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, that is, as limitations of the real desire of life, the object of which is power.
Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's Will to Life and Darwin's Struggle for Existence by the Will to Power. In his view the fight is not for life—bare existence—but for power. And he has a great deal to say—somewhat beside the mark—of the mean and paltry conditions those Englishmen must have had in view who set up the modest conception of the struggle for life. It appears to him as if they had imagined a world in which everybody is glad if he can only keep body and soul together. But life is only an expression for the minimum. In itself life seeks, not self-preservation alone, but self-increase, and this is precisely the "will to power." It is therefore obvious that there is no difference of principle between the new catchword and the old; for the struggle for existence necessarily leads to the conflict of forces and the fight for power. Now a system of justice, seen from this standpoint, is a factor in the conflict of forces. Conceived as supreme, as a remedy for every kind of struggle, it would be a principle hostile to life and destructive of the future and progress of humanity.
Something similar was in the mind of Lassalle, when he declared that the standpoint of justice was a bad standpoint in the life of nations. What is significant of Nietzsche is his love of fighting for its own sake, in contrast to the modern humanitarian view. To Nietzsche the greatness of a movement is to be measured by the sacrifices it demands. The hygiene which keeps alive millions of weak and useless beings who ought rather to die, is to him no true progress. A dead level of mediocre happiness assured to the largest possible majority of the miserable creatures we nowadays call men, would be to him no true progress. But to him, as to Renan, the rearing of a human species higher and stronger than that which now surrounds us (the "Superman"), even if this could only be achieved by the sacrifice of masses of such men as we know, would be a great, a real progress. Nietzsche's visions, put forth in all seriousness, of the training of the Superman and his assumption of the mastery of the world, bear so strong a resemblance to Renan's dreams, thrown out half in jest, of a new Asgard, a regular manufactory of Æsir (Dialogues philosophiques, 117), that we can scarcely doubt the latter's influence. But what Renan wrote under the overwhelming impression of the Paris Commune, and, moreover, in the form of dialogue, allowing both pro and con. to be heard, has crystallised in Nietzsche into dogmatic conviction. One is therefore surprised and hurt to find that Nietzsche never mentions Renan otherwise than grudgingly. He scarcely alludes to the aristocratic quality of his intellect, but he speaks with repugnance of that respect for the gospel of the humble which Renan everywhere discloses, and which is undeniably at variance with his hope of the foundation of a breeding establishment for supermen.
Renan, and after him Taine, turned against the almost religious feelings which were long entertained in the new Europe towards the first French Revolution. Renan regretted the Revolution betimes on national grounds; Taine, who began by speaking warmly of it, changed his mind on closer inquiry. Nietzsche follows in their footsteps. It is natural for modern authors, who feel themselves to be the children of the Revolution, to sympathise with the men of the great revolt; and certainly the latter do not receive their due in the present anti-revolutionary state of feeling in Europe. But these authors, in their dread of what in political jargon is called Cæsarism, and in their superstitious belief in mass movements, have overlooked the fact that the greatest revolutionaries and liberators are not the united small, but the few great; not the small ungenerous, but the great and generous, who are willing to bestow justice and well-being and intellectual growth upon the rest.
There are two classes of revolutionary spirits: those who feel instinctively drawn to Brutus, and those who equally instinctively are attracted by Cæsar. Cæsar is the great type; neither Frederick the Great nor Napoleon could claim more than a part of his qualities. The modern poetry of the 'forties teems with songs in praise of Brutus, but no poet has sung Cæsar. Even a poet with so little love for democracy as Shakespeare totally failed to recognise his greatness; he gave us a pale caricature of his figure and followed Plutarch in glorifying Brutus at his expense. Even Shakespeare could not see that Cæsar placed a very different stake on the table of life from that of his paltry murderer. Cæsar was descended from Venus; in his form was grace. His mind had the grand simplicity which is the mark of the greatest; his nature was nobility. He, from whom even to-day all supreme power takes its name, had every attribute that belongs to a commander and ruler of the highest rank. Only a few men of the Italian Renaissance have reached such a height of genius. His life was a guarantee of all the progress that could be accomplished in those days. Brutus's nature was doctrine, his distinguishing mark the narrowness that seeks to bring back dead conditions and that sees omens of a call in the accident of a name. His style was dry and laborious, his mind unfertile. His vice was avarice, usury his delight. To him the provinces were conquests beyond the pale. He had five senators of Salamis starved to death because the town could not pay. And on account of a dagger-thrust, which accomplished nothing and hindered nothing of what it was meant to hinder, this arid brain has been made a sort of genius of liberty, merely because men have failed to understand what it meant to have the strongest, richest and noblest nature invested with supreme power.
From what has been said above it will easily be understood that Nietzsche derives justice entirely from the active emotions, since in his view revengeful feelings are always low. He does not dwell on this point, however. Older writers had seen in the instinct of retaliation the origin of punishment. Stuart Mill, in his Utilitarianism, derived justice from already established punitive provisions (justum from jussum), which were precautionary measures, not reprisals. Rée, in his book on the Origin of Conscience, defended the kindred proposition that punishment is not a consequence of the sense of justice, but vice versa. The English philosophers in general derive the bad conscience from punishment. The value of the latter is supposed to consist in awakening a sense of guilt in the delinquent.
Against this Nietzsche enters a protest. He maintains that punishment only hardens and benumbs a man; in fact, that the judicial procedure itself prevents the criminal from regarding his conduct as reprehensible; since he is made to witness precisely the same kind of acts as those he has committed—spying, entrapping, outwitting and torturing—all of which are sanctioned when exercised against him in the cause of justice. For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal's "sin"; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism with which the Russians suffer to this day. In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him "better."
The bad conscience, then, is still unexplained. Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced—when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was inviolable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself—feelings of enmity, cruelty, delight in change, in hazard, violence, persecution, destruction—and thus the bad conscience originated.
When the State came into existence—not by a social contract, as Rousseau and his contemporaries assumed—but by a frightful tyranny imposed by a conquering race upon a more numerous, but unorganised population, then all the latter's instinct of freedom turned inwards; its active force and will to power were directed against man himself. And this was the soil which bore such ideals of beauty as self-denial, self-sacrifice, unselfishness. The delight in self-sacrifice is in its origin a phase of cruelty; the bad conscience is a will for self-abuse.
Then by degrees guilt came to be felt as a debt, to the past, to the ancestors; a debt that had to be paid back in sacrifices—at first of nourishment in its crudest sense—in marks of honour and in obedience; for all customs, as the work of ancestors, are at the same time their commands.7 There is a constant dread of not giving them enough; the firstborn, human and animal, are sacrificed to them. Fear of the founder grows in proportion as the power of the race increases. Sometimes he becomes transformed into a god, in which the origin of the god from fear is clearly seen.
The feeling of owing a debt to the deity steadily grew through the centuries, until the recognition of the Christian deity as universal god brought about the greatest possible outburst of guilty feeling. Only in our day is any noticeable diminution of this sense of guilt to be traced; but where the consciousness of sin reaches its culminating point, there the bad conscience eats its way like a cancer, till the sense of the impossibility of paying the debt—atoning for the sin—is supreme and with it is combined the idea of eternal punishment. A curse is now imagined to have been laid upon the founder of the race (Adam), and all sin becomes original sin. Indeed, the evil principle is attributed to Nature herself, from whose womb man has sprung—until we arrive at the paradoxical expedient in which tormented Christendom has found a temporary consolation for two thousand years: God offers himself for the guilt of mankind, pays himself in his own flesh and blood.
What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity, his capacity of judge and executioner, and in the next place to eternity, the "Beyond," pain without end, eternal punishment in hell.
In order rightly to understand the origin of ascetic ideals, we must, moreover, consider that the earliest generations of spiritual and contemplative natures lived under a fearful pressure of contempt on the part of the hunters and warriors. The unwarlike element in them was despicable. They had no other means of holding their own than that of inspiring fear. This they could only do by cruelty to themselves, mortification and self-discipline in a hermit's life. As priests, soothsayers and sorcerers they then struck superstitious terror into the masses. The ascetic priest is the unsightly larva from which the healthy philosopher has emerged. Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
Nevertheless the self-contradiction we find in asceticism—life turned against life—is of course only apparent. In reality the ascetic ideal corresponds to a decadent life's profound need of healing and tending. It is an ideal that points to depression and exhaustion; by its help life struggles against death. It is life's device for self-preservation. Its necessary antecedent is a morbid condition in the tamed human being, a disgust with life, coupled with the desire to be something else, to be somewhere else, raised to the highest pitch of emotion and passion.
The ascetic priest is the embodiment of this very wish. By its power he keeps the whole herd of dejected, fainthearted, despairing and unsuccessful creatures, fast to life. The very fact that he himself is sick makes him their born herdsman. If he were healthy, he would turn away with loathing from all this eagerness to re-label weakness, envy, Pharisaism and false morality as virtue. But, being himself sick, he is called upon to be an attendant in the great hospital of sinners—the Church. He is constantly occupied with sufferers who seek the cause of their pain outside themselves; he teaches the patient that the guilty cause of his pain is himself. Thus he diverts the rancour of the abortive man and makes him less harmful, by letting a great part of his resentment recoil on himself. The ascetic priest cannot properly be called a physician; he mitigates suffering and invents consolations of every kind, both narcotics and stimulants.
The problem was to contend with fatigue and despair, which had seized like an epidemic upon great masses of men. Many remedies were tried. First, it was sought to depress vitality to the lowest degree: not to will, not to desire, not to work, and so on; to become apathetic (Pascal's Il faut s'abêtir). The object was sanctification, a hypnotising of all mental life, a relaxation of every purpose, and consequently freedom from pain. In the next place, mechanical activity was employed as a narcotic against states of depression: the "blessing of labour." The ascetic priest, who has to deal chiefly with sufferers of the poorer classes, reinterprets the task of the unfortunate drudge for him, making him see in it a benefit. Then again, the prescription of a little, easily accessible joy, is a favourite remedy for depression; such as gladdening others, helping them in love of one's neighbour. Finally, the decisive cure is to organise all the sick into an immense hospital, to found a congregation of them. The disinclination that accompanies the sense of weakness is thereby combated, since the mass feels strong in its inner cohesion.
But the chief remedy of the ascetic priest was, after all, his reinterpretation of the feeling of guilt as "sin." The inner suffering was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out. Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, staring—in spite of Job—at guilt as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More pain! More pain!" Everything served the ascetic ideal. And then arose epidemics like those of St. Vitus's dance and the flagellants, witches' hysteria and the wholesale delirium of extravagant sects (which still lingers in otherwise beneficially disciplined bodies such as the Salvation Army).
The ascetic ideal has as yet no real assailants; there is no decided prophet of a new ideal. Inasmuch as since the time of Copernicus science has constantly tended to deprive man of his earlier belief in his own importance, its influence is rather favourable to asceticism than otherwise. At present the only real enemies and underminers of the ascetic ideal are to be found in the charlatans of that ideal, in its hypocritical champions, who excite and maintain distrust of it.
As the senselessness of suffering was felt to be a curse, the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning; a meaning which brought a new flood of suffering with it, but which was better than none. In our day a new ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture.
5.
Among Nietzsche's works there is a strange book which bears the title, Thus Spake Zarathustra. It consists of four parts, written during the years 1883-85, each part in about ten days, and conceived chapter by chapter on long walks—"with a feeling of inspiration, as though each sentence had been shouted in my ear," as Nietzsche wrote in a private letter.
The central figure and something of the form are borrowed from the Persian Avesta. Zarathustra is the mystical founder of a religion whom we usually call Zoroaster. His religion is the religion of purity; his wisdom is cheerful and dauntless, as that of one who laughed at his birth; his nature is light and flame. The eagle and the serpent, who share his mountain cave, the proudest and the wisest of beasts, are ancient Persian symbols.
This work contains Nietzsche's doctrine in the form, so to speak, of religion. It is the Koran, or rather the Avesta, which he was impelled to leave—obscure and profound, high-soaring and remote from reality, prophetic and intoxicated with the future, filled to the brim with the personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself.
Among modern books that have adopted this tone and employed this symbolic and allegorical style may be mentioned Mickiewicz's Book of the Polish Pilgrims, Slowacki's Anheli, and The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, who was influenced by Mickiewicz. A newer work, known to Nietzsche, is Carl Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881). But all these books, with the exception of Spitteler's, are biblical in their language. Zarathustra, on the other hand, is a book of edification for free spirits.
Nietzsche himself gave this book the highest place among his writings. I do not share this view. The imaginative power which sustains it is not sufficiently inventive, and a certain monotony is inseparable from an archaistic presentment by means of types.
But it is a good book for those to have recourse to who are unable to master Nietzsche's purely speculative works; it contains all his fundamental ideas in the form of poetic recital. Its merit is a style that from the first word to the last is full-toned, sonorous and powerful; now and then rather unctuous in its combative judgments and condemnations; always expressive of self-joy, nay, self-intoxication, but rich in subtleties as in audacities, sure, and at times great. Behind this style lies a mood as of calm mountain air, so light, so ethereally pure, that no infection, no bacteria can live in it—no noise, no stench, no dust assails it, nor does any path lead up.
Clear sky above, open sea at the mountain's foot, and over all a heaven of light, an abyss of light, an azure bell, a vaulted silence above roaring waters and mighty mountain-chains. On the heights Zarathustra is alone with himself, drawing in the pure air in full, deep breaths, alone with the rising sun, alone with the heat of noon, which does not impair the freshness, alone with the voices of the gleaming stars at night.
A good, deep book it is. A book that is bright in its joy of life, dark in its riddles, a book for spiritual mountain-climbers and dare-devils and for the few who are practised in the great contempt of man that loathes the crowd, and in the great love of man that only loathes so deeply because it has a vision of a higher, braver humanity, which it seeks to rear and train.
Zarathustra has sought the refuge of his cave out of disgust with petty happiness and petty virtues. He has seen that men's doctrine of virtue and contentment makes them ever smaller: their goodness is in the main a wish that no one may do them any harm; therefore they forestall the others by doing them a little good. This is cowardice and is called virtue. True, they are at the same time quite ready to attack and injure, but only those who are once for all at their mercy and with whom it is safe to take liberties. This is called bravery and is a still baser cowardice. But when Zarathustra tries to drive out the cowardly devils in men, the cry is raised against him, “Zarathustra is godless.”
He is lonely, for all his former companions have become apostates; their young hearts have grown old, and not old even, only weary and slothful, only commonplace—and this they call becoming pious again. "Around light and liberty they once fluttered like gnats and young poets, and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles." They have understood their age. They chose their time well. "For now do all night-birds again fly abroad. Now is the hour of all that dread the light." Zarathustra loathes the great city as a hell for anchorites' thoughts. "All lusts and vices are here at home; but here are also the virtuous, much appointable and appointed virtue. Much appointable virtue with scribe-fingers and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with little breast-stars and padded, haunchless daughters. Here is also much piety and much devout spittle-licking and honey-slavering before the God of hosts. For 'from on high' drippeth the star and the gracious spittle; and upward longeth every starless bosom."
And Zarathustra loathes the State, loathes it as Henrik Ibsen did and more profoundly than he.
To him the State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Its fundamental lie is that it is the people. No; creative spirits were they who created the people and gave it a faith and a love; thus they served life; every people is peculiar to itself, but the State is everywhere the same. The State is to Zarathustra that "where the slow suicide of all is called life." The State is for the many too many. Only where the State leaves oft does the man who is not superfluous begin; the man who is a bridge to the Superman.
From states Zarathustra has fled up to his mountain, into his cave.
In forbearance and pity lay his greatest danger. Rich in, the little lies of pity he dwelt among men.
"Stung from head to foot by poisonous flies and hollowed out like a stone by many drops of malice, thus did I sit among them, saying to myself: Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness. Especially they who call themselves the good, they sting in all innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they be just towards me?
"He who dwelleth among the good, him teacheth pity to lie. Pity breedeth bad air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable.
"Their stiff wise men did I call wise, not stiff. Their grave-diggers did I call searchers and testers—thus did I learn to confound speech. The grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. From old refuse arise evil exhalations. Upon the mountains one should live."
And with blessed nostrils he breathes again the freedom of the mountains. His nose is now released from the smell of all that is human. There sits Zarathustra with old broken tables of the law around him and new half-written tables, awaiting his hour; the hour when the lion shall come with the flock of doves, strength in company with gentleness, to do homage to him. And he holds out to men a new table, upon which such maxims as these are written—
Spare not thy neighbour! My great love for the remotest ones commands it. Thy neighbour is something that must be surpassed.
Say not: I will do unto others as I would they should do unto me. What thou doest, that can no man do to thee again. There is no requital.
Do not believe that thou mayst not rob. A right which thou canst seize upon, shalt thou never allow to be given thee.
Beware of good men. They never speak the truth. For all that they call evil—the daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay, the deep disgust with men, the will and the power to cut into the quick—all this must be present where a truth is to be born.
All the past is at man's mercy. But, this being so, it might happen that the rabble became master and drowned all time in its shallow waters, or that a tyrant usurped it all. Therefore we need a new nobility, to be the adversary of all rabble and all tyranny, and to inscribe on new tables the word "noble." Certainly not a nobility that can be bought, nor a nobility whose virtue is love of country. No, teaches Zarathustra, exiles shall ye be from your fatherlands and forefatherlands. Not the land of your fathers shall ye love, but your children's land. This love is the new nobility—love of that new land, the undiscovered, far-off country in the remotest sea. To your children shall ye make amends for the misfortune of being your fathers' children. Thus shall ye redeem all the past.
Zarathustra is full of lenity. Others have said: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Zarathustra teaches: The honest should say to each other, "Let us see whether our love continue; let us fix a term, that we may find out whether we desire a longer term." What cannot be bent, will be broken. A woman said to Zarathustra, "Indeed, I broke the marriage, but first did the marriage break me."
Zarathustra is without mercy. It has been said: Push not a leaning waggon. But Zarathustra says: That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push. All that belongs to our day is falling and decaying. No one can preserve it, but Zarathustra will even help it to fall faster.
Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat with enemies ye despise.
Why so hard? men cry to Zarathustra. He replies: Why so hard, once said the charcoal to the diamond; are we not near of kin? The creators are hard. Their blessedness it is to press their hand upon future centuries as upon wax.
No doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than that of the vanity and senselessness of life. This is in his eyes ancient babbling, old wives' babbling. And the pessimists who sum up life with a balance of aversion, and assert the badness of existence, are the objects of his positive loathing. He prefers pain to annihilation.
The same extravagant love of life is expressed in the Hymn to Life, written by his friend, Lou von Salomé, which Nietzsche set for chorus and orchestra. We read here—
"So truly loves a friend his friend
As I love thee, O Life in myst'ry hidden!
If joy or grief to me thou send;
If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden,
Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces;
And should'st thou doom me to depart,
So would I tear myself from thy embraces,
As comrade from a comrade's heart."
And the poem concludes—
"And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me.
Lead on I thou hast thy sorrow still!"8
When Achilles chose to be a day-labourer on earth rather than a king in the realm of the shades, the expression was a weak one in comparison with this passionate outburst, which paradoxically thirsts even for the cup of pain.
Eduard von Hartmann believes in a beginning and end of the "world process." He concludes that no eternity can lie behind us; otherwise everything possible must already have happened, which—according to his contention—is not the case. In sharp contrast to him, on this point as on others, Zarathustra teaches, with, be it said, a somewhat shallow mysticism—which is derived from the ancient Pythagoreans' idea of the circular course of history and is influenced by Cohelet's Hebrew philosophy of life—the eternal recurrence; that is to say, that all things eternally return and we ourselves with them, that we have already existed an infinite number of times and all things with us. The great clock of the universe is to him an hour-glass, which is constantly turned and runs out again and again. This is the direct antithesis of Hartmann's doctrine of universal destruction, and curiously enough it was put forward at about the same time by two French thinkers: by Blanqui in L'Éternité par les Astres (1871), and by Gustave Le Bon in L'Homme et les Sociétés (1881).
At his death Zarathustra will say: Now I disappear and die; in a moment I shall be nothing, for the soul is mortal as the body; but the complex of causes in which I am involved will return, and it will continually reproduce me.
At the close of the third part of Zarathustra there is a chapter headed "The Second Dance Song." Dance, in Nietzsche's language, is always an expression for the lofty lightness of mind, which is exalted above the gravity of earth and above all stupid seriousness. This song, extremely remarkable in its language, is a good specimen of the style of the work, when it soars into its highest flights of poetry. Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her, flinging out all his wrath with life and all his love of life.
“Lately looked I into thine eyes, O Life! Gold saw I gleaming in thy night-eye—my heart stood still with the joy of it.
“A golden skiff saw I gleaming upon shadowy waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swinging-skiff.
“At my foot, dancing-mad, didst thou cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting, swinging-glance.
“Twice only did thy little hands strike the castanets—then was my foot swinging in the madness of the dance.
*************************************
“I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me; I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!
“For thee, whose coldness inflameth, whose hatred mis-leadeth, whose flight enchaineth, whose mockery pleadeth!
“Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, inwindress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!”
In this dialogue between the dancers, Life and her lover, these words occur: O Zarathustra, thou art far from loving me as dearly as thou sayest; thou art not faithful enough to me. There is an old, heavy booming-clock; it boometh by night up to thy cave. When thou hearest this clock at midnight, then dost thou think until noon that soon thou wilt forsake me.
And then follows, in conclusion, the song of the old midnight clock. But in the fourth part of the work, in the section called "The Sleepwalker's Song," this short strophe is interpreted line by line; in form half like a mediæval watchman's chant, half like the hymn of a mystic, it contains the mysterious spirit of Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine concentrated in the shortest formula—
Midnight is drawing on, and as mysteriously, as terribly, and as cordially as the midnight bell speaketh to Zarathustra, so calleth he to the higher men: At midnight many a thing is heard which may not be heard by day; and the midnight speaketh: O man, take heed!
Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep wells? The world sleepeth. And shuddering it asketh: Who is to be master of the world? What saith the deep midnight?
The bell boometh, the wood-worm burroweth, the heart-worm gnaweth: Ah! the world is deep.
But the old bell is like a sonorous instrument; all pain hath bitten into its heart, the pain of fathers and forefathers; and all joy hath set it swinging, the joy of fathers and forefathers—there riseth from the bell an odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, golden-wine perfume of old happiness, and this song: The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.
I am too pure for the rude hands of the day. The purest shall be masters of the world, the unacknowledged, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. Deep is its woe.
But joy goeth deeper than heart's grief. For grief saith: Break, my heart! Fly away, my pain! Woe saith: Begone!
But, ye higher men, said ye ever Yea to a single joy, then said ye also Yea unto all woe. For joy and woe are linked, enamoured, inseparable. And all beginneth again, all is eternal. All joys desire eternity, deep, deep, eternity.
This, then, is the midnight song—
"Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
'Ich schlief, ich schlief—
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:—
Die Welt ist tief,
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
Tief ist ihr Weh—
Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit—
—will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!'"
6.
Such is he, then, this warlike mystic, poet and thinker, this immoralist who is never tired of preaching. Coming to him fresh from the English philosophers, one feels transported to another world. The Englishmen are all patient spirits, whose natural bent is towards the accumulation and investigation of a mass of small facts in order thereby to discover a law. The best of them are Aristotelian minds. Few of them fascinate us personally or seem to be of very complex personality. Their influence lies more in what they do than in what they are. Nietzsche, on the other hand, like Schopenhauer, is a guesser, a seer, an artist, less interesting in what he does than in what he is.
Little as he feels himself a German, he nevertheless continues the metaphysical and intuitive tradition of German philosophy and has the German thinker's profound dislike of any utilitarian point of view. In his passionate aphoristical form he is unquestionably original; in the substance of his thought he reminds one here and there of many another writer, both of contemporary Germany and of France; but he evidently regards, it as perfectly absurd that he should have to thank a contemporary for anything, and storms like a German at all those who resemble him in any point.
I have already mentioned how strongly he reminds one of Ernest Renan in his conception of culture and in his hope of an aristocracy of intellect that could seize the dominion of the world. Nevertheless he has not one appreciative word to say for Renan.
I have also alluded to the fact that Eduard von Hartmann was his predecessor in his fight against Schopenhauer's morality of pity. In this author, whose talent is indisputable, even though his importance may not correspond with his extraordinary reputation, Nietzsche, with the uncritical injustice of a German university professor, would only see a charlatan. Hartmann's nature is of heavier stuff than Nietzsche's. He is ponderous, self-complacent, fundamentally Teutonic, and, in contrast to Nietzsche, entirely unaffected by French spirit and southern sunshine. But there are points of resemblance between them, which are due to historical conditions in the Germany that reared them both.
In the first place, there was something analogous in their positions in life, since both as artillerymen had gone through a similar schooling; and in the second place, in their culture, inasmuch as the starting-point of both is Schopenhauer and both nevertheless retain a great respect for Hegel, thus uniting these two hostile brothers in their veneration. They are further in agreement in their equally estranged attitude to Christian piety and Christian morality, as well as in their contempt, so characteristic of modern Germany, for every kind of democracy.
Nietzsche resembles Hartmann in his attacks on socialists and anarchists, with the difference that Hartmann's attitude is here more that of the savant, while Nietzsche has the bad taste to delight in talking about "anarchist dogs," expressing in the same breath his own loathing of the State. Nietzsche further resembles Hartmann in his repeated demonstration of the impossibility of the ideals of equality and of peace, since life is nothing but inequality and war: "What is good? To be brave is good. I do not say, the good cause sanctifies war, but the good war sanctifies every cause." Like his predecessor, he dwells on the necessity of the struggle for power and on the supposed value of war to culture.
In both these authors, comparatively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural philosopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all-dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann approaches on many points the German snobbish national feeling. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle, as he is to the statesman "who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason called great," but something of Bismarck's spirit broods nevertheless over the works of both. As regards the question of war, the only difference between them is that Nietzsche does not desire war for the sake of a fantastic redemption of the world, but in order that manliness may not become extinct.
In his contempt for woman and his abuse of her efforts for emancipation Nietzsche again agrees with Hartmann, though only in so far as both here recall Schopenhauer, whose echo Hartmann is in this connection. But whereas Hartmann is here only a moralising doctrinaire with a somewhat offensive dash of pedantry, one can trace beneath Nietzsche's attacks on the female sex that subtle sense of woman's dangerousness which points to painful experience. He does not seem to have known many women, but those he did know, he evidently loved and hated, but above all despised. Again and again he returns to the unfitness of the free and great spirit for marriage. In many of these utterances there is a strongly personal note, especially in those which persistently assert the necessity of a solitary life for a thinker. But as regards the less personal arguments about woman, old-world Germany here speaks through the mouth of Nietzsche, as through that of Hartmann; the Germany whose women, in contrast to those of France and England, have for centuries been relegated to the domestic and strictly private life. We may recognise in these German writers generally that they have an eye for the profound antagonism and perpetual war between the sexes, which Stuart Mill neither saw nor understood. But the injustice to man and the rather tame fairness to woman, in which Mill's admirable emancipatory attempt occasionally results, is nevertheless greatly to be preferred to Nietzsche's brutal unfairness, which asserts that in our treatment of women we ought to return to "the vast common sense of old Asia."
Finally, in his conflict with pessimism Nietzsche had Eugen Dühring (especially in his Werth des Lebens) as a forerunner, and this circumstance seems to have inspired him with so much ill-will, so much exasperation indeed, that in a polemic now open, now disguised, he calls Dühring his ape. Dühring is a horror to him as a plebeian, as an Antisemite, as the apostle of revenge, and as the disciple of the Englishmen and of Comte; but Nietzsche has not a word to say about Dühring's very remarkable qualities, to which such epithets as these do not apply. But we can easily understand, taking Nietzsche's own destiny into consideration, that Dühring, the blind man, the neglected thinker who despises official scholars, the philosopher who teaches outside the universities, who, in spite of being so little pampered by life, loudly proclaims his love of life—should appear to Nietzsche as a caricature of himself. This was, however, no reason for his now and then adopting Dühring's abusive tone. And it must be confessed that, much as Nietzsche wished to be what, for that matter, he was—a Polish szlachcic, a European man of the world and a cosmopolitan thinker—in one respect he always remained the German professor: in the rude abuse in which his uncontrolled hatred of rivals found vent; and, after all, his only rivals as a modern German philosopher were Hartmann and Dühring.
It is strange that this man, who learned such an immense amount from French moralists and psychologists like La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Stendhal, was able to acquire so little of the self-control of their form. He was never subjected to the restraint which the literary tone of France imposes upon every writer as regards the mention and exhibition of his own person. For a long time he seems to have striven to discover himself and to become completely himself. In order to find himself he crept into his solitude, as Zarathustra into his cave. By the time he had succeeded in arriving at full independent development and felt the rich flow of individual thought within him, he had lost all external standards for measuring his own value; all bridges to the world around him were broken down. The fact that no recognition came from without only aggravated his self-esteem. The first glimmer of recognition further exalted this self-esteem. At last it closed above his head and darkened this rare and commanding intellect.
As he stands disclosed in his incompleted life-work, he is a writer well worth studying.
My principal reason for calling attention to him is that Scandinavian literature appears to me to have been living quite long enough on the ideas that were put forward and discussed in the last decade. It looks as though the power of conceiving great ideas were on the wane, and even as though receptivity for them were fast vanishing; people are still busy with the same doctrines, certain theories of heredity, a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of woman, a little morality of happiness, a little freethought, a little worship of democracy, etc. And as to the culture of our "cultured" people, the level represented approximately by the Revue des Deux Mondes threatens to become the high-water mark of taste. It does not seem yet to have dawned on the best among us that the finer, the only true culture begins on the far side of the Revue des Deux Mondes in the great personality, rich in ideas.
The intellectual development of Scandinavia has advanced comparatively rapidly in its literature. We have seen great authors rise above all orthodoxy, though they began by being perfectly simple-hearted believers. This is very honourable, but in the case of those who cannot rise higher still, it is nevertheless rather meagre. In the course of the 'seventies it became clear to almost all Scandinavian authors that it would no longer do to go on writing on the basis of the Augsburg Confession. Some quietly dropped it, others opposed it more or less noisily; while most of those who abandoned it entrenched themselves against the public, and to some extent against the bad conscience of their own childhood, behind the established Protestant morality; now and then, indeed, behind a good, everyday soup-stock morality—I call it thus because so many a soup has been served from it.
But be that as it may, attacks on existing prejudices and defence of existing institutions threaten at present to sink into one and the same commonplace familiarity.
Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old' catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy.
“The expression ‘aristocratic radicalism,’ which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself,”—Nietzsche, Dec. 2, 1887.
The Birth of Tragedy, p. 150 ff. (English edition).
The author of these lines has not made himself the advocate of this view, as has sometimes been publicly stated, but on the contrary has opposed it. After some uncertainty I pronounced against it as early as 1870, in Den franske Æsthetik i vore Dage, pp. 105, 106, and afterwards in many other places.
Nietzsche; Thoughts out of Season, II., p. 155 f. (English edition). Renan: Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques, p. 103. Flaubert: Lettres à George Sand, p. 139 ff.
Nietzsche supports his hypothesis by derivations, some doubtful, others incorrect; but their value is immaterial.
Where Nietzsche's words are quoted, in the course of this essay, considerable use has been made of the complete English translation of his works, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.—Tr.
Compare Lassalle's theory of the original religion of Rome. G. Brandes; Ferdinand Lassalle (London and New York, 1911), pp. 76 ff.
Translated by Herman Scheffauer. Text and pianoforte score are given in Vol. XVII (Ecce Homo) of the English edition of Nietzsche's works.
The Brandes essay was recommended to me when I was younger as a kind of introduction to Nietzsche and it serves that purpose very well.
Any ‘introduction to Nietzsche’ written in the past hundred years is invariably sullied by some political prejudice or another. Brandes wrote before Nietzsche’s ideas had “entered the world” so to speak and the reader benefits immensely by that timing.