It is hardly fair to a writer like Nietzsche, so poetical, fragmentary,
and immature, to judge him as a philosopher; yet he wished to be so
judged, and planned a system which was to be an emendation of that
of Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the will to dominate;
pessimism founded on reflection would become optimism founded on
courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a
more biological account of intelligence and taste; finally in the
place of pity and asceticism (Schopenhauer's two principles of morals)
Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and
being cruelly but beautifully strong.
These points of difference from Schopenhauer cover the whole philosophy
of Nietzsche. I will consider them in order, leaving the last for the
next chapter.
The change from "the will to live" to "the will to be powerful" is only
a change of metaphors: both are used merely to indicate the general
movement of nature. The choice of a psychological symbol for this
purpose is indifferent scientifically, since the [Pg 115] facts in any
case remain the same and our knowledge of them is not enlarged; yet it
is an interesting indication of the mind of the poet using it, because
whatever a man knows and loves best, that he takes his metaphors from.
Nietzsche had his reasons for liking to call the universal principle a
lust for power. He believed he was the herald of two hundred years of
war, he was in love with the vague image of a military aristocracy, and
he was not without a certain biological acumen.
An acorn in the ground does not strive to persevere in the state it
happens to be in, but expands, absorbs surrounding elements, and
transforms them into its own substance, which itself changes its form.
Here then is a will to grow, not simply a will to live or to preserve
oneself; in fact, as Nietzsche eloquently said, here is a will to
perish. It is true that when the oak is full grown it seems to pass
to the defensive and no longer manifests the will either to perish
or to grow. Even while the will to grow is operating, its scope is
not indefinite. It would be grotesque to imagine that the acorn, like
the ego of German philosophy, tended to annex the whole earth and
the whole sky and to make a single oak of the universe. If we take a
broad view, perhaps the ancient myth that nature tends to re-embody
certain fixed types, though inaccurate, gives a better picture of the
facts than [Pg 116] the modern myth that she is striving to change in
one predetermined direction. Nevertheless, the fact that Nietzsche's
attention was fascinated by the will to grow and to dominate shows that
he was in sympathy with young things, that his heart was big with the
future, and that his age believed in progress.
The change from pessimism to optimism, verbally so complete, did not
imply any divergence between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in their
description of the facts; it was all a matter of a little more spirit
in the younger thinker and a little more conscience in the elder.
Romantic poets and their heroes are well known to oscillate between
passionate despair and passionate enterprise. Schopenhauer affected
passionate despair, Nietzsche recommended passionate enterprise, each
being wedded exclusively to one of those moods which Faust or Byron
could feel alternately and reduce to act with all the dashing tumult of
anarchy. The value which the world has in the eyes of its inhabitants
is necessarily mixed, so that a sweeping optimism or pessimism can be
only a theoretic pose, false to the natural sentiment even of those who
assume it. Both are impressionistic judgments passed on the world at
large, not perhaps without some impertinence.
Yet it is these poses or attitudes, or, if you like, these
impertinences, that give importance to [Pg 117] transcendental
philosophers; it is their representative and contagious side; their
views of things would concern us little, if it was the things
themselves that we wished to understand, but our whole study is a study
in romanticism. The temper of the age ignored that man is a teachable
animal living in a natural world. All that was a vulgar convention; in
truth a disembodied Will was directed on any and every ideal at random,
and when any of these fantastic objects seemed to be attained nothing
was really accomplished, nothing was accumulated or learned. The wish
for some other will-o'-the-wisp immediately succeeded, always equally
passionate and equally foolish.
It is amazing that such a picture of human experience should have
met with anything but general derision; but when people read books
they compare them with other books, and when they turn to things they
forget books altogether. Hence the most palpable falsehoods are held
by general consent at certain moments, because they follow logically
from what the books of the previous generation had maintained. This
absurdity of Schopenhauer's is a plausible variation of idealism; to
see how absurd it is you must remember the facts of life, the existence
of any degree of civilisation or progress. In these the travail of
human nature appears; for human nature is not [Pg 118] merely a name
for a certain set of passions known to literature; in that sense
Schopenhauer fully acknowledged it, and even thought it immutable;
it is rather the constitution of an animal capable of training and
development. What is more patent than that a man may learn something by
experience and may be trained? But if he can be trained he is capable
of adaptation and, therefore, of happiness, and the preposterous
assertion that all desires are equally arbitrary and equally fruitless
is blown to the winds.
The belief in a romantic chaos lends itself to pessimism, but it
also lends itself to absolute self-assertion. Kant had boasted that
he had removed knowledge in order to make room for faith; in other
words, he had returned to chaos in order to find freedom. The great
egotists, who detested the pressure of a world they had not posited
or created, followed gladly in that path; but Schopenhauer was not
an egotist. Like Goethe he was probably more selfish personally than
those other philosophers whom their very egotism had made zealous and
single-minded; but in imagination and feeling he was, like Goethe,
genial and humane: the freedom and exuberance of nature impressed
him more than his own. Had he been an egotist, as Fichte, Hegel, and
Nietzsche were, he might have been an optimist like them. He was
rather a happy man, hugely enjoying [Pg 119] a great many things,
among them food and music; and he taught that music was a direct
transcript of the tormented will to live. How simple it would have been
for him, if he had been an egotist, to enjoy the spectacle of that
tormented will as much as the music which was its faithful image! But
no; such æsthetic cruelty, which was Nietzsche's delight, would have
revolted Schopenhauer. He thought tragedy beautiful because it detached
us from a troubled world and did not think a troubled world good, as
those unspeakable optimists did, because it made such a fine tragedy.
It is pleasant to find that among all these philosophers one at least
was a gentleman.
If Will is the sole substance or force in the universe, it must be
present in everything that exists, yet Schopenhauer affirmed that it
was absent in æsthetic contemplation; and he looked to an ultimate
denial of the Will, which if it was to be an act and not merely a void
would evidently be impossible on his principles. The Will might well
say to those who attempted to deny it: "They reckon ill who leave me
out; when me they fly, I am the wings." In perceiving and correcting
this contradiction, Nietzsche certainly improved the technique of the
system.
Yet that contradiction was not substantial; it was verbal merely, and
due to the fond use of the term [Pg 120] Will for what might more
properly be called matter, energy, or movement. Will taken in the
metaphorical sense can never be in abeyance, so long as anything is
going on; but will taken in its proper sense is in abeyance often; and
this is what Schopenhauer saw and meant to say. Actual and conscious
will is a passing phenomenon; it is so little necessary to life that
it always disappears when life is at its height. All pure pleasures,
including those of seeing and thinking, are without it: they are
ingenuous, and terminate in their present object. A philosopher should
have learned from Aristotle, if not from his own experience, that at
the acme of life we live in the eternal, and that then, as Schopenhauer
said, we no longer pry but gaze, and are freed from willing.
This is not to say that Nietzsche was not very happy and witty in his
description of the passions that dominate artists and philosophers,
and in urging that the life of the spirit was an impassioned thing. To
prove it, he might have quoted Schopenhauer himself, in those moving
passages where he describes the ecstasy of thought and the spell of
beauty. It is not the dead or the bloodless that have such feelings. Of
course, if the operations of the brain, and the whole instinctive life
of the soul, were interrupted neither these feelings nor any others
would arise. This was at bottom Schopenhauer's conviction. His [Pg 121]
great intuition, the corner-stone of his philosophy, was precisely the
priority of automatism and instinct over the intellect. His only error
came from having given to these underlying processes the name of Will,
when properly the will is one expression of them only, as the intellect
is.
Nietzsche, who adopted the same metaphor, was led by it into the very
confusion which he criticised in Schopenhauer. Nietzsche had no great
technical competence: he saw the inconsistency only when he disliked
the result; when the result fell in with his first impressions he
repeated the inconsistency. He often condemned other moralists for
being enemies to life: he reproached the greater part of mankind for
loving inglorious ease and resenting the sufferings inseparable from
the will to be mighty and to perish. But this churlish attitude of the
vulgar would be quite impossible if the heroic will to be powerful were
the essence of everybody and even of material things. If I am nothing
but the will to grow, how can I ever will to shrink?
But this inconsistency in Nietzsche, like that in Schopenhauer, was
an honourable one that came of forgetting a false generalisation
in the presence of a clear fact. That the will to be powerful is
everywhere was a false generalisation; but it was a clear fact that
some people are pious Christians or Epicurean [Pg 122] philosophers,
who do not care at all about conquering the world. They want to be
let alone, and perhaps have a shrewd suspicion that no one lives
under such dire compulsions as he who undertakes to tyrannise over
others. This slave-morality of theirs might be called Will, though it
is rather instinct and habit; but it is certainly not a will to be
powerful: it is the opposite of that passion. Thus Nietzsche, by an
honest self-contradiction, pointed to people who denied the will to be
powerful, in order to abuse them, just as Schopenhauer had pointed to
people who denied or suspended the will to live, in order to praise
them.
[Pg 123] CHAPTER XII