An old philosopher—Aristotle, of course—called man a political being. By
this he meant that man was naturally endowed for society, and, further,
that society could find its full fruition only in the state. To the old
Greek, this political vocation of man seemed great and sublime. Only
_one_ will ruled in the state. This one will synthesized all the
individual wills, no matter how powerful and diverse they were. And this
one will made all the distributive wills strong, and demonstrated its
superiority to the totality of all such wills. The one will wills more
than it can do, on that account becomes a statesman, that is, widens out
his will to a state-will. Thus, the one will wins a new and wider sphere
for its abilities and activities.
But it was the modern—post mediaeval—state which was the first to set
the thought of that impersonal, unemotional philosopher in its true
light. The modern state has brought to consciousness the whole gigantic
weight of the world’s political unfolding of force. The modern state is
related to what the ancient Greeks called state, the Hellenic
city-community, much as one of our mighty industrial machines is related
to the primitive tool of a day-laborer, or a modern machine-gun to the
sling and bow of an ancient warrior. Our states are indeed machines. All
their parts fit into each other with the utmost precision, and work with
astonishing accuracy. Our states are also huge weapons with numberless
barrels, but employed by a single will, unloaded at the word of a single
Commander.
It was the first chancellor of the German Empire who once asserted at a
meeting of the _Reichstag_ that _politics ruined character_! This of
course put a damper on all the ardor that lauded to the skies the
greatest invention of modern times, the new miracle of the state. This
assertion clangs like a first elegiac note—like the intimation of an
interior fatality, deep-seated already in the organism of the modern
political and cultural life. This word utters no sentimental fanaticism
which, with all sorts of romantic scruples and moral standards, observes
the course of the immense evolution of folk life. This brave word comes
from a man whom the whole world of his day celebrated as the foremost
master of the art of politics. In his hands, the political machine
underwent an unheard-of development of power. And what this statesman
expressed only provisionally perhaps in an ill-humored, unguarded moment
has been meanwhile developed by earnest men to a conscious, serious
concern for men of a new and growing culture. These men have preached
that men should turn aside from political life; they have seen in spirit
a coming day in which state-less, unpolitical man shall have reached a
purer higher stage of life than was at all possible under the banner of
a political culture. _Anarchists_ we today call these warriors against
the state. What they fight, these warriors, is not this or that
particular form of state, not this or that particular institution, but
the state in every form, state in general. But because the word
anarchism is ambiguous, because it is not simply an ancient theory, but
occasionally signifies a quite tangible _praxis_, we must distinguish
between the ideal, the spiritual champions of anarchism, and the
preachers of a propaganda of bloody deed. While, at best, the latter
would only drive out the devil by Beelzebub, the former would have a
noble faith in the victorious power of the idea. Theirs is the high
faith that the might of ideals is mightier than the might of force. They
trust that humanity will overcome the political malady through spiritual
development and inner strength, and will mature in the direction of an
anarchistic culture. And in the rank of these idealistic anarchists, who
contemplate the state as the most grievous hindrance to a noble and pure
humanity—a Prince Kropotkin, a Count Tolstoi, a former German army
officer von Egidy—_Friedrich Nietzsche_ also belongs, aye, he leads the
van of all the poets and thinkers who espy the future task of humanity
in the negation, the overcoming, of the state.
Anarchism, even in its most ideal form, seems dismal enough to most men.
Yet it is understandable—even a natural necessity—in the evolution of
modern life. It is with the spiritual currents of life as it is with the
vibrations of the pendulum. The stronger the movement toward the one
side, the further the rebound toward the other. As a matter of fact, the
political pendulum has been far removed from the line of equilibrium.
The cultured peoples of Europe—and it was these, not the American
people, which Nietzsche had in mind,—had worked themselves into a
political debauch in which there scarcely seemed to be any other
interest than that of politics. What the Church was to the mediaeval man
the state became to the modern man—God manifest on earth! Men believed
in this state as their Christ. All power in heaven and on earth seemed
to be given to it, too. What was preached in the name of the state was a
gospel to its believers. To these believers it even seemed a sin to
doubt the wisdom of the state at all. It was blasphemy to contest the
state’s claim to omnipotence. Once when it was said: Rome has spoken!
all the rest of the world grew dumb in deferential silence. Later it was
said: Paris, Petersburg, Berlin, has spoken! and a voice from heaven
could not have been hearkened to more sacredly than did political souls
take heed to such state edicts. Good? What is good if not that which
benefits the state? Truth? But where is there truth apart from the word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of the state? The political end
sanctifies any means—makes anything good over which men would be
otherwise enraged, stamps anything as true which would be otherwise
branded a lie in the world.
Nietzsche hit the nail on the head when he stigmatized the state, in the
sense of his time, as the _new idol_, and made it say in a Zarathustra
discourse; “On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the
regulative finger of God”—“everything will it give _you_, if _ye_
worship it, the new idol.” And this _culture_ of the state was brought
into a system by the philosopher; it was preached in the pulpit; prayed
at the altar. Numberless were the offerings which were brought to this
new idol—of beings, of human happiness and of human life, aye, of human
reason and human conscience! For whoever serves this idol, whoever would
truly serve it, may no longer have regard for himself, may no longer
consult his own judgment. He is the better fitted to be priest of this
state, the less he is burdened with scruples of his own conscience. He
is all the more serviceable a scribe, the more smoothly he can adapt his
well-oiled theology to reasons of state. Truly, they were not the worst
spirits who rebelled against such idolatry. They were prophets of a new
culture who took martyrdom upon themselves, and no small martyrdom at
that, to unhorse a belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of the
state. For this belief oppressed men. Out of men with living souls, it
made ciphers to be added to one so as to give that one worth. Politics
needs masses, herds. The individual, the personality, who does not
surrender himself to the masses, who does not think like an animal in a
herd, is troublesome. Therefore, it passes as supreme wisdom of the
state to uniformize all men, to discipline and drill men to whom the
sight of a uniformized mass arouses the feeling of sublime beauty, to
whom a thousand-throated hurrah sounds like the loveliest music. How
much tender feeling, how much inner life, has been stifled in the day’s
political alarum—who can tell? “Yea,” says Nietzsche, “a dying for many
hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a
hearty service unto all preachers of death!
“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the
bad: the state where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the
state, where the slow suicide of all—is called ‘life.’”
The sin of the schoolmaster against man as he piles dead history in the
image of the ugliest man upon the present, and blocks his future—all
this has first attained to power and recognition through the political
system, and has thereby become a fatality, an extremity of the cultural
life of old Europe. So Nietzsche saw and said as he looked abroad over
the lands and peoples of his day. Out of the spiritual formation of the
individual, the state made a mechanical drill of the masses. Out of the
teacher and educator of the people, there came to be a master of a
school, a slave of a rule, of a method. The state laid its hand on head
and heart—then it needed the historian to manipulate and adjust history
for political purposes. The state took science into its service—and
conquered praise from the mouth of the artist himself!
To seek salvation from political sickness, this is now the redemptive
service of all the men and women to whom man is higher than the state—to
whom _the ideals of humanity and of personality_ are alone sacred and
supreme. The remedy today is what it once was in old Rome: secession,
migration of the spirit to the holy mount of freedom, where the soul
breathes no state air, where it is not suffocated and oppressed by the
iron bars of the state. Secession in art—that means unpolitical art, an
art which knows higher tasks than the glorification of political power,
than the erection of shafts of victory, than promenades of victory!
Secession in science—that means a free university whose teachers, says
Nietzsche, do not receive their appointments through superannuated
militarists and ministers of state, _a high school of the spirit_, in
which there are no political honors and insignia, but also no state
discipline and non-age—a school where everything is said and taught
which an earnest inquiring soul can receive from the world of nature and
of man in earnest responses of his spirit. Secession in religion—that
means, finally, a free church, in which faith is not an official
dictation, but a firm conviction of the inner man, a church where
worship is not an inherited rule and custom, but the heart’s and life’s
free expression in ways of its own. Who will deny that the best and
highest which our day has to show in every sphere of the spirit’s life,
must be considered everywhere as a work of secession, of rebellion; that
all this has an anarchistic vein, an unpolitical, antipolitical, yes, a
superpolitical stamp? Over all finer natures there have come a bitter
depression and indignation at all political doing and dickering; they
would rather stay and work at home where no one strives nor cries, than
walk the streets so full of the uproar which politicians make. All
souls, turned to within, the clairvoyants of the spirit and the fine
tasters of life agree of course with Nietzsche, that “where the state
ends, there man begins”! The state has its pattern and uniform for the
“many too many,” for the superfluous who in great choruses bawl of the
most superfluous that there is for man. Great souls seek sites for lone
ones and twain ones, they seek them beyond the many too many—there they
sing the songs of that which is necessary for man, the single and
irreplaceable melody, through which man jubilates along to his higher
existence. The state has killed and crushed the peoples, it has summoned
into the world the great lie: “I, the state, am the people.” But there
is only one redemption and convalescence from the state on the part of
the people, a flight “to people who do not understand the state and hate
it as an evil eye and sin in custom and law; which speaks its own tongue
of good and evil and makes its own language of custom and law.” Thus is
secession the emigration from the state into the _people_; the culture
of the future is the overcoming of the state through the people!
To be sure, it is with mixed feelings that we penetrate and interpret
the preaching of the anarchist Nietzsche. The catalogue of sins which,
on a deeper observation of life, we have to charge to state _cultus_ is
indeed great, and hence there is an anarchistic side to the heart of the
modern man, as soon as he thinks of his own rights, as soon as he
requires light and air for the free unfolding of his personality. We
know that the state does not possess eternal life. The state is only a
special form in which human social life can exist, not human society
itself. There have not always been states. They came to be in the long
course of the evolution of a people’s life! What comes to be must pay
its toll to Father Time. The state will change—and pass! Hence it is
indeed folly and superstition, it is idolatry, when we attribute eternal
worth to transitory phenomena, and accord them an unconditional dominion
over us.
But, for all that, there is the state still; and although we may not say
with Hegel, the special hero of state omnipotence, that all that is real
is rational, yet never is anything that really is, entirely irrational.
The state is still the soil on which we stand and which we till, that it
may be able to receive the seed of the spirit—the state is an
evolutionary stage of human culture. It is a vessel for the reception of
the life of the human spirit. It is one of the conditions of life
through which present man must make his way of necessity, if he is to
fulfil his highest destiny. Therefore it is also folly and superstition,
an idolatry of one’s own ego, and of one’s own personality, if a man
thinks he can unfold the wealth of the human by turning aside from the
state. Where the life interests of man solidify to political tendencies,
there remains something for the solitary man to see and to learn, to do
and to achieve; and it is a subtle and dangerous temptation when a man
in his solitude proposes to find his satisfaction in the enjoyment of
his books and in the world of his own thoughts and feelings without
concern for the weal or woe of the political body of which he is a
member. Politics is raw to refined natures. But so is all the material
with which man labors, and out of which he fashions what is fine. Let
creative spirits make out of the state a human society in which all
human greatness can grow.
The idolatry of the state is, like any idolatry, a poison in popular
life. But the antidote which anarchism administers to the present
generation, sick of the state, namely, dominion on the part of the ego,
the _cultus_ of the _Ichmensch_, does not make the matter better, but
perhaps only worse. The personality of man is indeed his _summum bonum_,
his soul and life; but only the whole, free, full personality, which
feels the pulsations of the common life of humanity, of the world—only
the man to whom, as old Terence said, nothing human is foreign, because
he is in a position to read in all the human the language and revelation
of the eternal. This man is a political being, but not a political being
alone. He has his own soul which he affirms against any claim of
politics and preserves from injury. He lives in the state, but also
above the state. He knows well-springs of being without which the state
would be a desert and dry ground. He is a religious personality who
falls down and supplicates no majesty, because he knows God whom alone
we ought to worship and serve!