Nietzsche occasionally spoke disparagingly of morality, as if the
word and the thing had got a little on his nerves; and some of his
best-known phrases might give the impression that he wished to
drop the distinction between good and evil and transcend ethics
altogether. Such a thought would not have been absurd in itself or even
unphilosophical. Many serious thinkers, Spinoza for instance, have
believed that everything that happens is equally necessary and equally
expressive of the will of God, be it favourable or unfavourable to
our special interests and, therefore, called by us good or bad. A too
reverent immersion in nature and history convinces them that to think
any part of reality better or worse than the rest is impertinent or
even impious. It is true that in the end these philosophers usually
stultify themselves and declare enthusiastically that whatever is is
right. This rapturous feeling can overcome anybody in certain moods,
as it sometimes overcame Nietzsche; but in yielding to it, besides
contradicting all other moral judgments, these mystics break their
difficult resolution never to judge at all.
[Pg 124] Nietzsche, however, was entirely free from this divine
impediment in morals. The courage to cling to what his soul
loved--and this courage is the essence of morality--was
conspicuous in him. He was a poet, a critic, a lover of form and of
distinctions. Few persons have ever given such fierce importance to
their personal taste. What he disliked to think of, say democracy, he
condemned with the fulminations of a god; what he liked to think of,
power, he seriously commanded man and nature to pursue for their single
object.
What Nietzsche disparaged, then, under the name of morality was not
all morality, for he had an enthusiastic master-morality of his own to
impose. He was thinking only of the Christian virtues and especially
of a certain Protestant and Kantian moralism with which perhaps he
had been surfeited. This moralism conceived that duty was something
absolute and not a method of securing whatever goods of all sorts are
attainable by action. The latter is the common and the sound opinion,
maintained, for instance, by Aristotle; but Nietzsche, who was not
humble enough to learn very much by study, thought he was propounding
a revolutionary doctrine when he put goods and evils beyond and above
right and wrong: for this is all that his _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_
amounts to. Whatever seemed to him [Pg 125] admirable, beautiful,
eligible, whatever was good in the sense opposed not to _böse_ but
to _schlecht_, Nietzsche loved with jealous affection. Hence his ire
against Christianity, which he thought renounced too much. Hence his
hatred of moralism, which in raising duty to the irresponsible throne
of the absolute had superstitiously sacrificed half the goods of life.
Nietzsche, then, far from transcending ethics, re-established it on its
true foundations, which is not to say that the sketchy edifice which
he planned to raise on these foundations was in a beautiful style of
architecture or could stand at all.
The first principle of his ethics was that the good is power. But this
word power seems to have had a great range of meanings in his mind.
Sometimes it suggests animal strength and size, as in the big blonde
beast; sometimes vitality, sometimes fortitude, sometimes contempt
for the will of others, sometimes (and this is perhaps the meaning he
chiefly intended) dominion over natural forces and over the people,
that is to say, wealth and military power. It is characteristic of this
whole school that it confuses the laws which are supposed to preside
over the movement of things with the good results which they may
involve; so Nietzsche confuses his biological insight, that all life
is the assertion of some sort of power--the power to breathe, for
instance--with the [Pg 126] admiration he felt for a masterful
egotism. But even if we identify life or any kind of existence with
the exertion of strength, the kinds of strength exerted will be
heterogeneous and not always compatible. The strength of Lucifer does
not insure victory in war; it points rather to failure in a world
peopled by millions of timid, pious, and democratic persons. Hence
we find Nietzsche asking himself plaintively, "Why are the feeble
victorious?" The fact rankled in his bosom that in the ancient world
martial aristocracies had succumbed before Christianity, and in the
modern world before democracy. By strength, then, he could not mean the
power to survive, by being as flexible as circumstances may require.
He did not refer to the strength of majorities, nor to the strength of
vermin. At the same time he did not refer to moral strength, for of
moral strength he had no idea.
The arts give power, but only in channels prescribed by their own
principles, not by the will of untrained men. To be trained is to be
tamed and harnessed, an accession of power detestable to Nietzsche.
His Zarathustra had the power of dancing, also of charming serpents
and eagles: no wonder that he missed the power, bestowed by goodness,
of charming and guiding men; and a Terpsichorean autocrat would be
hard to imagine. A man intent on algebra [Pg 127] or on painting is
not striving to rule anybody; his dominion over painting or algebra is
chiefly a matter of concentration and self-forgetfulness. So dominion
over the passions changes them from attempts to appropriate anything
into sentiments of the mind, colouring a world which is no longer
coveted. To attain such autumnal wisdom is, if you like, itself a power
of feeling and a kind of strength; but it is not helpful in conquering
the earth.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His
talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a
harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in
the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature,
music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious;
it could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it.
Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely
an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity.
What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond
his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a
passionate rebellion against it.
The phrases in which Nietzsche condensed and felt his thought were
brilliant, but they were seldom just. We may perhaps see the principle
of his ethics [Pg 128] better if we forget for a moment the will to
be powerful and consider this: that he knew no sort of good except
the beautiful, and no sort of beauty except romantic stress. He was
a belated prophet of romanticism. He wrote its epitaph, in which he
praised it more extravagantly than anybody, when it was alive, had had
the courage to do.
Consider, for example, what he said about truth. Since men were
governed solely by the will to be powerful, the truth for its own sake
must be moonshine to them. They would wish to cultivate such ideas,
whether true or false, as might be useful to their ambition. Nietzsche
(more candid in this than some other pragmatists) confessed that truth
itself did not interest him; it was ugly; the bracing atmosphere of
falsehood, passion, and subjective perspectives was the better thing.
Sometimes, indeed, a more wistful mood overtook him, and he wondered
whether the human mind would be able to endure the light of truth. That
was the great question of the future. We may agree that a mind without
poetry, fiction, and subjective colouring would not be human, nor a
mind at all; and that neither truth nor the knowledge of truth would
have any intrinsic value if nobody cared about it for its own sake.
But some men do care; and in ignoring this fact Nietzsche expresses
the false and pitiful notion that we can be [Pg 129] interested in
nothing except in ourselves and our own future. I am solitary, says the
romantic egotist, and sufficient unto myself. The world is my idea, new
every day: what can I have to do with truth?
This impulse to turn one's back on truth, whether in contempt or in
despair, has a long history. Lessing had said that he preferred the
pursuit of truth to the truth itself; but if we take this seriously
(as possibly it was not meant) the pursuit of truth at once changes
its character. It can no longer be the pursuit of truth, truth not
being wanted, but only the pursuit of some fresh idea. Whether one of
these ideas or another comes nearer to the truth would be unimportant
and undiscoverable. Any idea will do, so long as it is pregnant with
another that may presently take its place; and as presumably error will
precipitate new ideas more readily than truth, we might almost find
it implied in Lessing's maxim that, as Nietzsche maintained, what is
really good is neither truth nor the pursuit of truth (for you might
find it, and what would you do then?), but rather a perpetual flux of
errors.
This view is also implied in the very prevalent habit of regarding
opinions as justified not by their object but by their date. The
intellectual ignominy of believing what we believe simply because of
the time and place of our birth, escapes many evolutionists. [Pg 130]
Far from trying to overcome this natural prejudice of position, they
raise it into a point of pride. They declare all opinions ever held
in the past to be superseded, and are apparently content that their
own should be superseded to-morrow, but meantime they cover you with
obloquy if you are so backward or so forward as not to agree with them
to-day. They accept as inevitable the total dominion of the point of
view. Each new date, even in the life of an individual thinker, is
expected by them to mark a new phase of doctrine. Indeed, truth is an
object which transcendental philosophy cannot envisage: the absolute
ego must be satisfied with consistency. How should the truth, actual,
natural, or divine, be an expression of the living will that attempts,
or in their case despairs, to discover it? Yet that everything, even
the truth, is an expression of the living will, is the corner-stone of
this philosophy.
Consider further the spirit in which Nietzsche condemned Christianity
and the Christian virtues. Many people have denounced Christianity on
the ground that it was false or tyrannical, while perhaps admitting
that it was comforting or had a good moral influence. Nietzsche
denounced it--and in unmeasured terms--on the ground that
(while, of course, as true as any other vital lie) it was mean,
depressing, slavish, and plebeian. How beastly was [Pg 131] the
precept of love! Actually to love all these grotesque bipeds was
degrading. A lover of the beautiful must wish almost all his neighbours
out of the way. Compassion, too, was a lamentable way of assimilating
oneself to evil. That contagious misery spoiled one's joy, freedom, and
courage. Disease should not be nursed but cauterised; the world must be
made clean.
Now there is a sort of love of mankind, a jealous love of what man
might be, in this much decried maxim of unmercifulness. Nietzsche
rebelled at the thought of endless wretchedness, pervasive mediocrity,
crying children, domestic drudges, and pompous fools for ever. _Die
Erde war zu lange schon ein Irrenhaus!_ His heart was tender enough,
but his imagination was impatient. When he praised cruelty, it was on
the ground that art was cruel, that it made beauty out of suffering.
Suffering, therefore, was good, and so was crime, which made life
keener. Only crime, he said, raises a man high enough for the lightning
to strike him. In the hope of sparing some obscure person a few groans
or tears, would you deprive the romantic hero of so sublime a death?
Christians, too, might say they had their heroes, their saints; but
what sort of eminence was that? It was produced by stifling half the
passions. A [Pg 132] sister of charity could not be an Arminius;
devotion to such remedial offices spoilt the glory of life. Holiness
was immoral; it was a half-suicide. _All_ experience, the ideal of
Faust, was what a spirited man must desire. All experience would
involve, I suppose, passing through all the sensations of a murderer,
a maniac, and a toad; even through those of a saint or a sister of
charity. But the romantic mind despises results; it is satisfied with
poses.
Consider, too, the romantic demand for a violent chiaroscuro, a
demand which blossoms into a whole system of ethics. Good and evil,
we are told, enhance one another, like light and shade in a picture;
without evil there can be no good, so to diminish the one is to
undermine the other, and the greatest and most heroic man is he who
not only does most good but also most harm. In his love of mischief,
in his tenderness for the adventurer who boldly inflicts injury and
suffering on others and on himself, in order to cut a more thrilling
and stupendous figure in his own eyes, Nietzsche gave this pernicious
doctrine its frankest expression; but unfortunately it was not wholly
his own. In its essence it belongs to Hegel, and under various
sophistical disguises it has been adopted by all his academic followers
in England and America. The arguments used to defend it are old
sophisms borrowed from the Stoics, who [Pg 133] had turned the physical
doctrine of Heraclitus, that everything is a mixture of contraries,
into an argument for resignation to inevitable evils and detachment
from tainted goods. The Stoics, who were neither romantic nor worldly,
used these sophisms in an attempt to extirpate the passions, not to
justify them. They were sufficiently refuted by the excellent Plutarch
where he observes that according to this logic it was requisite and
necessary that Thersites should be bald in order that Achilles might
have leonine hair. The absurdity is, indeed, ludicrous, if we are
thinking of real things and of the goods and evils of experience; but
egotists never think of that; what they always think of is the picture
of those realities in their imagination. For the observer, effects of
contrast do alter the values of the elements considered; and, indeed,
the elements themselves, if one is very unsympathetic, may not have
at all in contemplation the quality they have in experience: whence
æsthetic cruelty. The respect which Hegel and Nietzsche have for those
sophisms becomes intelligible when we remember what imperturbable
egotists they were.
This egotism in morals is partly mystical. There is a luxurious joy
in healing the smart of evil in one's mind, without needing to remove
or diminish the evil in the world. The smart may be healed by [Pg
134] nursing the conviction that evil after all is good, no matter how
much of it there is or how much of it we do. In part, however, this
egotism is romantic; it does not ask to be persuaded that evil, in
the end, is good. It feels that evil is good in the present; it is so
intense a thing to feel and so exciting a thing to do. Here we have
what Nietzsche wished to bring about, a reversal of all values. To do
evil is the true virtue, and to be good is the most hopeless vice.
Milk is for babes; your strong man should be soaked in blood and in
alcohol. We should live perilously; and as material life is the power
to digest poisons, so true excellence is the power to commit all manner
of crimes, and to survive.
That there is no God is proved by Nietzsche pragmatically, on the
ground that belief in the existence of God would have made him
uncomfortable. Not at all for the reason that might first occur to
us: to imagine himself a lost soul has always been a point of pride
with the romantic genius. The reason was that if there had been any
gods he would have found it intolerable not to be a god himself. Poor
Nietzsche! The laurels of the Almighty would not let him sleep.
It is hard to know if we should be more deceived in taking these
sallies seriously or in not taking them so. On the one hand it all
seems the swagger [Pg 135] of an immature, half-playful mind, like a
child that tells you he will cut your head off. The dreamy impulse,
in its inception, is sincere enough, but there is no vestige of any
understanding of what it proposes, of its conditions, or of its
results. On the other hand these explosions are symptomatic; there
stirs behind them unmistakably an elemental force. That an attitude
is foolish, incoherent, disastrous, proves nothing against the
depth of the instinct that inspires it. Who could be more intensely
unintelligent than Luther or Rousseau? Yet the world followed them,
not to turn back. The molecular forces of society, so to speak, had
already undermined the systems which these men denounced. If the
systems have survived it is only because the reformers, in their
intellectual helplessness, could supply nothing to take their place.
So Nietzsche, in his genial imbecility, betrays the shifting of great
subterranean forces. What he said may be nothing, but the fact that
he said it is all-important. Out of such wild intuitions, because the
heart of the child was in them, the man of the future may have to build
his philosophy. We should forgive Nietzsche his boyish blasphemies. He
hated with clearness, if he did not know what to love.
[Pg 136] CHAPTER XIII