English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged
under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only
exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called
_Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books,
we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections
shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles”
at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by
the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche
allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a
systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate
and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues;
because they were often written in swift succession, one after another,
there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we
are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece
together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may
resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant
change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues
or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish
brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast,
and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood
doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task
to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease
to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten
thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen
ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able
to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme
than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader
of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in
detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each
other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an
uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s
habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work
began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The
seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but
the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a
fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of
truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman,
and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new
crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in
psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can
but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books,
but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his
books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of
discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche
from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it
broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of
continual exploration.
“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,”
but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility.
Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often
caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without
the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not
easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To
succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude.
But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to
understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is
desirable.
Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions
in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss
laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and
yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free
will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his
manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow
himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements,
which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of
circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their
totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity
which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation
that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion
of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining
circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in
practice that circumstances determine.
We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between
some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic
of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will,
that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that
wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and
some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including
only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and
examine the Nietzschean universe.
The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche
something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write
of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot
die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will
‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not
unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy,
expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite
pain:
“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the
law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in
entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that
the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for
ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into
existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of
the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.)
Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even
explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did
contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein
lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself
in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its
individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the
future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner
or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in
every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a
similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:
“If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy,
as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept
remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that
the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations
in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In
infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must
once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been
realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between
every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every
other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone,
and since every one of these combinations would determine the
whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely
identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown
to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself
an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all
eternity.”
Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a
clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem:
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne
Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai
Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,
Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta
Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:
Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:
Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6]
admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the
lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are
the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these
same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same
order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s
memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have
wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”
The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of
this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he
leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless
manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before
every deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to
perform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.” It does
not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a
standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts
are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not
as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of
ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as
“the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring
it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.
Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine
Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this
eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is
representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could
know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of
meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in
its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s
world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first
being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment
of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the
time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the
conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth
century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had
supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the
regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the
will to power, in which that other will may or may not be included.
Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power,
unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area
over which to exercise it.
But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in
individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity.
Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself
as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the
creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again,
Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding,
not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first
imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path
was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.”
He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to
power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a
superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this
particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type
shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to
the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with
Seannchan, the poet:
“The stars had come so near me that I caught
Their singing. It was praise of that great race
That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,
With a high head, and open hand, and how,
Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series
of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their
result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to
speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series
of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the
other.
Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea
from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman
allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared
to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_
reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the
sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different
from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the
large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a
friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a
neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the
friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste
of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of
thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.”
A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not
realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this:
“Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in
ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of
fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an
art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion
confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong
pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the
greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life.
Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner,
wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse
himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted
comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by
noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I
had cherished of him.”
Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book
that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati,
the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying”
to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though
they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the
tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a
proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest.
He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and
this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and
bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually
preserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely
an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life
words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art.
These words were “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The latter word has
been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the
fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian
as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this
antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:
1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two
art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in
the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between
the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of
music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies
were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance,
and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful
births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which
is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till
at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they
appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually
generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic
tragedy.”
2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts
from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of
every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities
of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the
living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which
differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo
stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium
individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance
is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus
the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the
Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”
He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and
drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian
artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to
Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an
alternation of conquest and captivity:
“And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat.
Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles,
And binds her down for his delight.”
It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of
consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of
the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing
of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do
not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic
criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the
criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper
of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because
Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age”
he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo,
shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age
as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he
would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and
conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of
Apollo.
There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good
and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of
truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not
man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and
are continually being re-made _by_ man. “There is no such thing as
moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which
interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with
his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche
believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler
morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the
Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who
possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did _not_ originate among those to
whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves;
that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the
high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that
their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in
contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the
plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman
forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a
survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations”
of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have
they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His
hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question.
The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the
plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s
point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption
by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks
to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human
activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the
highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes
by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded
to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging
them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept
that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their
natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap
to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and
tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s
best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for
praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for
example, of the “widespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,” a
spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not
abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be
that which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the
sake of the nimble, the nimblest--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is
not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy
dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves.
He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times
that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and
merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his
writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what
they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them
from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with
moralities, but asks each of his “higher men” to be true to his
own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his
private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in
accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to
a higher, a more laughing perfection.