THE OVERMAN
Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the
ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three
tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to marry one, but she would not
have him; after which he wrote contemptuously of them all. Despite the
fact that he was a clergyman’s son, he suffered from hereditary
syphilis, and went insane--a tragic waste of the greatest genius of
modern times.
Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a
Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of
thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at
the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting
to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast.
Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they
said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of
his writings--easy for the average person, who has never experienced
such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be
troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in
better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it
contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to
grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest
imaginative writing of several centuries.
But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill
and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two
hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven
mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do
not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may
learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the
human spirit.
One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of the aristocratic over
the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and
he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the
invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that
basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only
trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a
conqueror of new universes for our race.
There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On
the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming
brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it
represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life
which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where
he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where
Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great
and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he
failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely
ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double
ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his
influence counts on the side of the forces he hated.
Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the
arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and
to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and
development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of
self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a
slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he
proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.”
Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he
became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of
the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to
evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to
stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,”
several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might
have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote
“Uebermensch.”
This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” with fervor and
splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had
never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made
up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and
five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation
from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the
ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote
a portion of this passage:
Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman--a, cord above an
abyss.
A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking
backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can
be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.
I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going
under, for such are those going across.
I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that
are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other
shore.
You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs,
those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back
in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is
taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to
the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic
sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his
two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he
could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted
in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of
Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale
murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan &
Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s
historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of
Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers,
and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the
Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.”
Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the whole Prussian state
machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms;
when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in
reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different
kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not
distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and
those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war
eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist
society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings
and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he
perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists
and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under
the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document
which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as
the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic
and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his
social thought for life.
I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra
and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is
possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it
is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and
lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in
the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a
world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for
money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take
seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern.
Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in
quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like
Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of
Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to
woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should
dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does
not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman
will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the
Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen a photograph of
Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in
this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and
the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud
has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture
which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence.
Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for
this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as
the Christian hermits and monks--and for the same reason, because he
wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and
history repeats itself--the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught!
Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she
nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he
wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was
dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman--but he
begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there.