NIETZSCHE
I
From Spinoza to Nietzsche
Let us dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of
philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that
our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of
only _many_, not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the
assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological
tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the
problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips
through this generalization; he is a man of leisure lost in the maze of
a puzzle which he has not discovered so much as he has unconsciously
constructed it. In Locke’s hands the puzzle is distorted into the
question of “innate ideas,” in order that under cover of an innocent
epistemological excursion a blow may be struck at hereditary prejudices
and authoritarian teaching, and the way made straight for the advance of
popular sovereignty (as against the absolutism of Hobbes), free speech,
reasonable religion, and social amelioration. The dominance of the
social interest is not so easily shown in the case of Leibniz; but let
it be remembered none the less that epistemology was but an aside in the
varied drama of Leibniz’ life, and that his head was dizzy with schemes
for the betterment of this “best of all possible worlds.” Bishop
Berkeley begins with _esse est percipi_ and ends with tar-water as the
_solution_ of all problems. David Hume, in the midst of a life busied
with politics and the discussion of social, political, and economic
problems, spares a year or two for epistemology, only to use it as a
handle whereby to deal a blow to dogma; he “was more damaging to
religion than Voltaire, but was ingenious enough not to get the credit
for it.”[121] The social incidence of philosophy in eighteenth-century
France was so decided that one might describe that philosophy as part of
the explosive with which the middle class undermined the _status quo_.
This social emphasis continues in Comte, who cannot forget that he was
once the secretary of St. Simon, and will not let us forget that the
function of the philosopher is to coördinate experience with a view to
the remoulding of human life. John Stuart Mill is radical first and
logician afterward; and the more lasting as well as the more interesting
element in Spencer is the sociological, educational, and political
theory. In Kant the basic social interest is buried under
epistemological cobwebs; yet not so choked but that it finds very
resolute voice at last. The essence of the matter here is the return of
the prodigal, the relapse of a once adventurous soul into the comfort of
religious and political absolutes, categorical--and Potsdam--imperatives.
Here is “dogmatic slumber” overcome only to yield to the torpor and
_abêtisement_ of “practical reason”; here is no “Copernican revolution”
but a stealthy attempt to recover an anthropocentricism lost in the
glare of the Enlightenment. It dawns on us that the importance of German
philosophy is not metaphysical, nor epistemological, but political;
the vital remnant of Kant to-day is to be found not in our overflowing
Mississippi of Kantiana, but in the German notion of obedience.[122]
Fichte reënforces this notion of unquestioning obedience with the
doctrine of state socialism: he begins by tending geese, and ends by
writing philosophy for them. So with Hegel: he starts out buoyantly with
the proposition that revolution is the heart of history, and ends by
discovering that the King of Prussia is God in disguise. In Schopenhauer
the bubble bursts; a millennium of self-deception ends at last in
exhaustion and despair. Every Hildebrand has his Voltaire, and every
Voltaire his Schopenhauer.
II
Biographical
“In future,” Nietzsche once wrote, “let no one concern himself about me,
but only about the things for which I lived.” We must make this
biographical note brief.
Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Germany, 1844, the son of a “noble young
parson.” He was brought up in strict piety, and prepared himself to
enter the ministry; even at boarding-school he was called “the little
minister,” and made people cry by his recitations from the Bible. We
have pictures of him which show him in all his boyish seriousness; it is
evident that he is of a deeply religious nature, and therefore doomed to
heresy. At eighteen he discovers that he has begun to doubt the
traditional creed. “When I examine my own thoughts,” he writes, “and
hearken into my own soul, I often feel as if I heard the buzzing and
roaring of wild-contending parties.”[123] At twenty-one, while studying
in the University of Leipzig, he discovers the philosophy of
Schopenhauer; he reads all hungrily, feeling here a kindred youth; “the
need of knowing myself, even of gnawing at myself, forcibly seized upon
me.”[124] He is ripe for pessimism, having both religion and a bad
stomach. Because of his defective eyesight he is barred from military
service; in 1870 he burns with patriotic fever, and at last is allowed
to join the army as a nurse; but he is almost overcome at sight of the
sick and wounded, and himself falls ill with dysentery and dyspepsia. In
this same year he sees a troop of cavalry pass through a town in stately
gallop and array; his weakened frame thrills with the sight of this
strength: “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will
to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence,
but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”[125]
Nevertheless, he settles down to a quietly ascetic life as professor of
philology at the University of Basle. But there is adventure in him; and
in his first book[126] he slips from the prose of philology into an
almost lyrical philosophy. Illness finds voice here in the eulogy of
health; weakness in the deification of strength; melancholy in the
praise of “Dionysian joy”; loneliness in the exaltation of friendship.
He has a friend--Wagner--the once romantic rebel of revolution’s
barricades; but this friend too is taken from him, with slowly painful
breaking of bond after bond. For Wagner, the strong, the overbearing,
the ruthless, is coming to a philosophy of Christian sympathy and
gentleness; qualities that cannot seem divine to Nietzsche, because they
are long-familiar elements in his own character. “What I am not,” he
says, most truthfully, “that for me is God and virtue.”[127] And so he
stands at last alone, borne up solely by the exhilaration of creative
thought. He has acquaintances, but he puts up with them “simply, like a
patient animal”; “not one has the faintest inkling of my task.” And he
suffers terribly “through this absence of sympathy and
understanding.”[128]
He leaves even these acquaintances, and abandons his work at Basle;
broken in health he finds his way hopefully to the kindlier climate of
Italy. Doctor after doctor prescribes for him, one prescription reading,
“a nice Italian sweetheart.” He longs for the comradeship, but dreads
the friction, of marriage. “It seems to me absurd,” he writes, “that one
who has chosen for his sphere ... the assessment of existence as a
whole, should burden himself with the cares of a family, with winning
bread, security, and social position for wife and children.” He does not
hesitate to conclude that “where the highest philosophical thinking is
concerned all married men are suspect.”[129] Nevertheless he wanders
humanly into something very like a love-affair; he is almost shattered
with rapid disillusionment, and takes refuge in philosophy. “Every
misunderstanding,” he tells himself, “has made me freer. I want less and
less from humanity, and can give it more and more. The severance of
every individual tie is hard to bear; but in each case a wing grows in
its place.”[130] And yet the need of comradeship is still there, like a
gnawing hunger: many years later he catches a passing smile from a
beautiful young woman, whom he has never seen before; and “suddenly my
lonely philosopher’s heart grew warm within me.”[131] But she walks off
without seeing him, and they never meet again.
The simple Italians who rent him his attic room in Genoa understand him
better perhaps than he can be understood by more pretentious folk. They
know his greatness, though they cannot classify it. The children of his
landlady call him “Il Santo”; and the market-women keep their choicest
grapes for the bent philosopher who, it is whispered, writes bitterly
about women and “the superfluous.” But what they know for certain is
that he is a man of exceeding gentleness and purity, that he is the very
soul of chivalry; “stories are still told of his politeness towards
women to whom no one else showed any kindness.”[132] Let him write what
he pleases, so long as he is what he is.
He lives simply, almost in poverty. “His little room,” writes a visitor,
“is bare and cheerless. It has evidently been selected for cheapness
rather than for comfort. No carpet, not even a stove. I found it
fearfully cold.”[133] His publisher has made no profit on his books;
they are too sharply opposed to the “spirit of the age”; hence
the title he gives to two of his volumes: _Unzeitgemässe
Betrachtungen_,--_Thoughts Out of Season_. There is no money, he is now
informed, in such untimely volumes; hereafter he must publish his books
at his own cost. He does, stinting himself severely to meet the new
expense; his greatest books see the light in this way.[134]
He works hard, knowing that his shaken frame has but short lease of
life; and he comes to love his painful solitude as a gift. “I can’t help
seeing an enemy in any one who breaks in upon my working summer.... The
idea that any person should intrude upon the web of thought which I am
spinning around me, is simply appalling. I have no more time to
lose--unless I am stingy with my precious _half-hours_ I shall have a
bad conscience.”[135] Half-hours; his eyes will not work for more than
thirty minutes at a time. He feels that only to him to whom time is holy
does time bring reward. “He is fully convinced,” an acquaintance writes
of him, “about his mission and his permanent importance. In this belief
he is strong and great; it elevates him above all misfortune.”[136] He
speaks of his _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ in terms of almost conscious
exaggeration: “It is a book,” he says, “that stands alone. Do not let us
mention the poets in the same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been
produced out of such a superabundance of strength.”[137] He does not
know that it is his illness and his hunger for appreciation that have
demanded this self-laudation as restorative and nourishment. He
predicts, rightly enough, that he will not begin to get his due meed of
appreciation till 1901.[138] His “unmasking of Christian morality,” he
says, “is an event unequalled in history.”[139]
All this man’s energy is in his brain; he oozes ideas at every pore. He
crowds into a sentence the material of a chapter; and every aphorism is
a mountain-peak. He dares to say that which others dare only to think:
and we call him witty because truth tabooed is the soul of wit. Every
page bears the imprint of the passion and the pain that gave it birth.
“I am not a man,” he says, “I am dynamite”; he writes like a man who
feels error after error exploding at his touch; and he defines a
philosopher as “a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything
is in danger.”[140] “There are more idols than realities in the world;
and I have an ‘evil eye’ for idols.”[141]
What is this philosophy which seemed to its creator more important than
even the mightiest events of the past? How shall we compress it without
distorting it, as it has been distorted by so many of its lovers and its
haters? Let us ask the man himself to speak to us; let us see if we
cannot put the matter in his own words, ourselves but supplying, so to
speak, connective tissue. That done, we shall understand the man better,
and ourselves, and perhaps our social problem.
III
Exposition
1
_Morality as Impotence_
From a biological standpoint the phenomenon morality is of a highly
suspicious nature.[142] _Cui bono?_--Whom shall we suspect of profiting
by this institution? Is it a mode of enhancing life?--Does it make men
stronger and more perfect?--or does it make for deterioration and decay?
It is obvious that up to the present, morality has not been a problem at
all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met after
all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of
peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves.[143] But
what if morality be the greatest of all the stumbling-blocks in the way
of human self-betterment? Is it possible that morality itself is the
social problem, and that the solution of that problem lies in the
judicious abolition of morality? It is a view for which something can be
said.
You have heard that morality is a means used by the strong to control
the weak. And it is true: just consider the conversion of Constantine.
But to stop here is to let half the truth be passed off on you as the
whole; and half a truth is half a lie. Much more true is it that
morality is a means used by the weak to control the strong, the chain
which weakness softly lays upon the feet of strength. The whole of the
morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the
herd.[144] Every one’s desire is that there should be no other teaching
and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself
succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all
times has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of
the weak; their chief weapon in this process was the moral
principle.[145] Good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts no
one, attacks no one, does not take vengeance but hands over vengeance to
God; who goes out of the way of evil, and demands little from life; like
ourselves, patient, meek, just. Good is to do nothing for which we are
not strong enough.[146] Zarathustra laughed many times over the
weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws![147]
Obedience, subordination, submission, devotion, love, the pride of duty;
fatalism, resignation, objectivity, stoicism, asceticism, self-denial;
in short, anemia: these are the virtues which the herd would have all
men cultivate,--particularly the strong men.[148] And the deification of
Jesus,--that is to say of meekness,--what was it but another attempt to
lull the strong to sleep?
2
_Democracy_
See, now, how nearly that attempt has succeeded. For is not democracy,
if not victorious, at least on the road to victory to-day? And what is
the democratic movement but the inheritor of Christianity?[149] Not the
Christianity of the great popes; they knew better, and were building a
splendid aristocracy when Luther spoiled it all by letting loose the
levelling instincts of the herd.[150] The instinct of the herd is in
favor of the leveller (Christ).[151] I very much fear that the first
Christian is in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything
privileged; he lives and struggles unremittingly for “equal
rights.”[152] It is by Christianity, more than by anything else, that
the poison of this doctrine of “equal rights” has been spread abroad.
And do not let us underestimate the fatal influence! Nowadays no one has
the courage of special rights, of rights of dominion. The aristocratic
attitude of mind has been most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the
equality of souls.[153]
But is not this the greatest of all lies--the “equality of men”? That is
to say, the dominion of the inferior. Is it not the most threadbare and
discredited of ideas? Democracy represents the disbelief in all great
men and select classes; everybody equals everybody else; “at bottom we
are all herd.” There is no welcome for the genius here; the more
promising for the future the modern individual happens to be, the more
suffering falls to his lot.[154] If the rise of great and rare men had
been made dependent upon the voices of the multitude, there never would
have been any such thing as a great man. The herd regards the exception,
whether it be above or beneath its general level, as something
antagonistic and dangerous. Their trick in dealing with the exceptions
above them--the strong, the mighty, the wise, the fruitful--is to
persuade them to become their head-servants.[155]
But the torture of the exceptional soul is only part of the villainy of
democracies. The other part is chaos. Voltaire was right: “_Quand la
populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu_.” Democracy is an
aristocracy of orators, a competition in headlines, a maelstrom of ever
new majorities, a torrent of petty factions sweeping on to ruin. Under
democracy the state will decay, for the instability of legislation will
leave little respect for law, until finally even the policeman will have
to be replaced by private enterprise.[156] Democracy has always been the
death-agony of the power of organization:[157] remember Athens, and look
at England. Within fifty years these Babel governments will clash in a
gigantic war for the control of the markets of the world; and when that
war comes, England will pay the penalty for the democratic inefficiency
of its dominant muddle-class.[158]
This wave of democracy will recede, and recede quickly, if men of
ability will only oppose it openly. It is necessary for higher men to
declare war on the masses. In all directions mediocre people are joining
hands in order to make themselves master. The middle classes must be
dissolved, and their influence decreased;[159] there must be no more
intermarrying of aristocracy with plutocracy; this democratic folly
would never have come at all had not the master-classes allowed their
blood to be mingled with that of slaves.[160] Let us fight parliamentary
government and the power of the press; they are the means whereby
cattle become rulers.[161] Finally, it is senseless and dangerous to let
the counting-mania (the custom of universal suffrage)--which is still
but a short time under cultivation, and could easily be uprooted--take
deeper root; its introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of
temporary difficulties; the time is ripe for a demonstration of
democratic incompetence and a restoration of power to men who are born
to rule.[162]
3
_Feminism_
Democracy, after all, is a disease; an attempt on the part of the
botched to lay down for all the laws of social health. You may observe
the disease in its growth-process by studying the woman movement.
Woman’s first and last function is that of bearing robust children.[163]
The emancipated ones are the abortions among women, those who lack the
wherewithal to have children (I go no farther, lest I should become
medicynical).[164] All intellect in women is a pretension; when a woman
has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her
sex. These women think to make themselves charming to free spirits by
wearing advanced views; as though a woman without piety would not be
something perfectly obnoxious and ludicrous to a profound and godless
man![165] If there is anything worthy of laughter it is the man who
takes part in this feminist agitation. Let it be understood clearly that
the relations between men and women make equality impossible. It is in
the nature of woman to take color and commandment from a man,--unless
she happens to be a man. Man’s happiness is “I will,” woman’s happiness
is “He will.”[166] Woman gives herself, man takes her: I do not think
one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract.[167]
Indeed, women will lose power with every step towards emancipation.
Since the French Revolution the influence of woman has declined in
proportion as she has increased her rights and claims. Let her first do
her proper work properly (consider how much man has suffered from
stupidity in the kitchen), and then it may be time to consider an
extension of her activities. To be mistaken in this fundamental problem
of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the
necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here of equal
rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical
sign of shallow-mindedness. On the other hand, a man who has depth of
spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence
which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with
them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her
as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for
service and accomplishing her mission therein--he must take his stand in
this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority
of the instincts of Asia.[168]
4
_Socialism and Anarchism_
All this uprising of housekeepers is, of course, part of the general
sickness with which Christianity has inoculated and weakened the strong
races of Europe. Consider now the more virulent forms of the disease:
socialism and anarchism. The coming of the “kingdom of God” has here
been placed in the future, and been given an earthly, a human, meaning;
but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained. There
is still the comforting delusion about equal rights, with all the envy
that lurks in that delusion. One speaks of “equal rights”: that is to
say, so long as one is not a dominant personality, one wishes to prevent
one’s competitors from growing in power.[169] It is a pleasure for all
poor devils to grumble--it gives them a little intoxicating sensation of
power. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation.[170] When
you hear one of those reformers talk of humanity, you must not take him
seriously; it is only his way of getting fools to believe that he is an
altruist; beneath the cover of this buncombe a man strong in the
gregarious instincts makes his bid for fame and followers and power.
This pretense to altruism is only a roundabout way of asking for
altruism, it is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is
botched and bungled.[171] In short, socialism is not justice but
covetousness.[172] No doubt we should look upon its exponents and
followers with ironic compassion: they want something which we
have.[173]
From the standpoint of natural science the highest conception of society
according to socialists is the lowest in the order of rank among
societies. A socialist community would be another China, a vast and
stifling mediocracy; it would be the tyranny of the lowest and most
brainless brought to its zenith.[174] A nation in which there would be
no exploitation would be dead. Life itself is essentially appropriation,
conquest of the strange and weak; to put it at its mildest,
exploitation.[175] The absence of exploitation would mean the end of
organic functioning. Surely it is as legitimate and valuable for
superior men to command and use inferior men as it is for superior
species to command and use inferior species, as man commands and uses
animals.[176] It is not surprising that the lamb should bear a grudge
against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the
great birds of prey.[177] What should be done with muscle except to
supply it with directive brains? How, otherwise, can anything worthy
ever be built by men? In fact, man has value and significance only in so
far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first
of all to be solid; he has to be a “stone.”[178]
Now the common people understand this quite well, and are as happy as
any of the well-to-do, so long as a silly propaganda does not disturb
them with dreams that can never be fulfilled.[179] Poverty,
cheerfulness, and independence--it is possible to find these three
qualities combined in one individual; poverty, cheerfulness, and
slavery--this is likewise a possible combination: and I can say nothing
better to the workmen who serve as factory-slaves.[180]
As for the upper classes, they need be at no loss for weapons with which
to fight this pestilence. An occasional opening of the trap-door between
the Haves and the Have-nots, increasing the number of property-owners,
will serve best of all. If this policy is pursued, there will always be
too many people of property for socialism ever to signify anything more
than an attack of illness.[181] A little patience with inheritance and
income taxes, and the noise of the cattle will subside.[182]
Notice, meanwhile, that socialism and despotism are bedfellows. Give the
socialist his way, and he will put everything into the hands of the
state,--that is to say, into the hands of demagogue politicians.[183]
And then, all in the twinkling of an eye, socialism begets its opposite
in good Hegelian fashion, and the dogs of anarchism are let loose to
fill the world with their howling. And not without excuse or benefit;
for politicians must be kept in their place, and the state rigidly
restricted to its necessary functions, even if anarchist agitation helps
one to do it.[184] And the anarchists are right: the state is the
coldest of all monsters, and this lie creeps out of its mouth, “I, the
State, am the people.”[185] So the wise man will turn anarchism, as well
as socialism, to account; and he will not fret even when a king or two
is hurried into heaven with nitroglycerine. Only since they have been
shot at have princes once more sat securely on their thrones.[186]
Anarchism justifies itself in the aristocrat, who feels law as his
instrument, not as his master; but the rebellion against law as such is
but one more outburst of physiological misfits bent on levelling and
revenge.[187] It is childish to desire a society in which every
individual would have as much freedom as another.[188] Decadence speaks
in the democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and
wishes to rule, the modern _misarchism_ (to coin a bad word for a bad
thing).[189] When all men are strong enough to command, then law will be
superfluous; weakness needs the vertebræ of law. He is commanded who
cannot obey his own self. Let the anarchist be thankful that he has laws
to obey. To command is more difficult; whenever living things command
they risk themselves; they take the hard responsibilities for the
result.[190] Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves;[191]
when the mob is capable of that, it will be time to think of dispensing
with law. The truth is, of course, that the anarchist is lulled into
nonsense by Rousseau’s notion of the naturally good man. He does not
understand that revolution merely unlashes the dogs in man, till they
once more cry for the whip.[192] Cast out the Bourbons, and in ten years
you will welcome Napoleon.
That is the end of anarchism; and it is the end of democracy, too.
The truth is that men are willing and anxious to be ruled by rulers
worthy of the name. But the corrupted ruling classes have brought ruling
into evil odor. The degeneration of the ruler and of the ruling classes
has been the cause of all the disorders in history. Democracy is not
ruling, but drifting; it is a political relaxation, as if an organism
were to allow each of its parts to do just as it pleased. Precisely
these disorganizing principles give our age its specific character. Our
society has lost the power to function properly; it no longer rids
itself naturally of its rotten elements; it no longer has the strength
even to excrete.[193]
5
_Degeneration_
What kind of men is to be found in such a society? Mediocre men; men
stupid to the point of sanctity; fragile, useless souls-de-luxe; men
suffering from a sort of hemiplegia of virtue,--that is to say,
paralyzed in the self-assertive instincts; men tamed, almost emasculated
by a morality whose essence is the abdication of the will.[194] Now, as
a rule, the taming of a beast is achieved only by deteriorating it; so
too the moral man is not a better man, he is rather a weaker member of
his species. He is altruistic, of course; that is, he feels that he
needs help. There is no place for really great men in this march towards
nonentity; if a great man appears he is called a criminal.[195] A
Periclean Greek, a Renaissance Florentine, would breathe like one
asphyxiated in this moralic acid atmosphere; the first condition of life
for such a man is that he free himself from this Chinadom of the
spirit.[196] But the number of those who are capable of rising into the
pure air of unmoralism is very small; and those who have made timid
sallies into theological heresy are the most addicted to the comfort and
security of ethical orthodoxy. In short, men are coming to look upon
lowered vitality as the heart of virtue; and morality will be saddled
with the guilt if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendor of
the human species should never be attained.[197]
Men of this stamp require a good deal of religious pepsin to overcome
the indigestibility of life; if they leave one faith in the passing
bravery of their youth they soon sink back into another.[198] God,
previously diluted from tribal deity into _substantia_ and
_ding-an-sich_,[199] now recovers a respectable degree of reality; the
imaginary pillar on which men lean is made stronger and more concrete as
their weakness increases. How much faith a person requires in order to
flourish, how much fixed opinion he needs which he does not wish to have
shaken, because he holds himself thereby,--is a measure of his power (or
more plainly speaking, of his weakness).[200]
The same criterion classifies our friends the metaphysicians,--those
albinos of thought,--who are, of course, priests in disguise.[201] The
degree of a man’s will-power may be measured by the extent to which he
can dispense with the meaning in things; by the extent to which he is
able to endure a world without meaning; because he himself arranges a
small portion of it.[202] The world has no meaning: all the better; put
some meaning into it, says the man with a man’s heart. The world has no
meaning: but it is only a world of appearance, says the weak-kneed
philosopher; behind this phenomenal world is the real world, which has
meaning, and means good. Of the real world “there is no knowledge;
consequently there is a God”--what novel elegance of syllogism![203]
This belief that the world which ought to be is real is a belief proper
to the unfruitful who do not wish to create a world. The “will to truth”
is the impotence of the “will to create.”[204] Even monism is being
turned into medicine for sick souls; clearly these lovers of wisdom seek
not truth, but remedies for their illnesses.[205] There is too much beer
and midnight oil in modern philosophy, and not enough fresh air.[206]
Philosophers condemn this world because they have avoided it; those who
are contemplative naturally belittle activity.[207] In truth, the
history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the
prerequisites of life, of the feelings which make for the real values of
life.[208] No wonder that philosophy is fallen to such low estate.
Science flourishes nowadays, and has the good conscience clearly
visible on its countenance; while the remnant to which modern philosophy
has gradually sunk excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and
pity. Philosophy reduced to a “theory of knowledge,” a philosophy that
never gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously denies itself the right
to enter--that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony;
something that awakens pity. How could such a philosophy rule![209]
6
_Nihilism_
All these things, democracy, feminism, socialism, anarchism, and modern
philosophy, are heads of the Christian hydra, each a sore in the total
disease. Given such illness, affecting all parts of the social body, and
what result shall we expect and find? Pessimism, despair,
nihilism,--that is, disbelief in all values of life.[210] Confidence in
life is gone; life itself has become a problem. Love of life is still
possible,--only it is the love of a woman of whom one is doubtful.[211]
The “good man” sees himself surrounded by evil, discovers traces of evil
in every one of his acts. And thus he ultimately arrives at the
conclusion, which to him is quite logical, that nature is evil, that man
is corrupted, and that being good is an act of grace (that is to say, it
is impossible to man when he stands alone). In short, _he denies
life_.[212] The man who frees himself from the theology of the Church
but adheres to Christian ethics necessarily falls into pessimism. He
perceives that man is no longer an assistant in, let alone the
culmination of, the evolutionary process; he perceives that Becoming has
been aiming at Nothing, and has achieved it; and that is something which
he cannot bear.[213] Suffering, which was, before, a trial with promised
reward, is now an intolerable mystery; if he is materially comfortable
himself, he finds source for sentiment and tears in the pain and misery
of others; he concocts a “social problem,” and never dreams that the
social problem is itself a result of decadence.[214] He does not feel at
home in this world in which the Christian God is dead, and to which,
nevertheless, he brings nothing more appreciative than the old Christian
moral attitude. He despairs because he is a chaos, and knows it; “I do
not know where I am, or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not
where it is or what to do,” he sighs.[215] Life, he says at last, is not
worth living.
Let us not try to answer such a man; he needs not logic but a
sanitarium. But see, through him, and in him, the destructiveness of
Christian morals. This despicable civilization, says Rousseau, is to
blame for our bad morality. What if our good morality is to blame for
this despicable civilization?[216] See how the old ethic depreciates
the joy of living, and the gratitude felt towards life; how it checks
the knowledge and unfolding of life; how it chokes the impulse to
beautify and ennoble life.[217] And at what a time! Think what a race
with masculine will could accomplish now! Precisely now, when will in
its fullest strength were necessary, it is in the weakest and most
pusillanimous condition. Absolute mistrust concerning the organizing
power of the will: to that we have come.[218] The world is dark with
despair at the moment of greatest light.
What if man could be made to love the light and use it?
7
_The Will to Power_
Is it possible that this despair is not the final state in the
exhaustion of a race, but only a transition from belief in a perfect and
ethical world to an attitude of transvaluation and control?[219] Perhaps
we are at the bottom of our spiritual toboggan, and an ascending
movement is around the corner of the years. Now that our Christian
bubble has burst into Schopenhauer, we are left free to recover some
part of the joyous strength of the ancients. Let us become again as
little children, unspoiled by religion and morality; let us forget what
it is to feel sinful; let the thousandfold laughter of children clear
the air of the odor of decay. Let us begin anew; and the soul will rise
and overflow all its margins with the joy of rediscovered life.[220]
Life has not deceived us! On the contrary, from year to year it appears
richer, more desirable, and more mysterious; the old fetters are broken
by the thought that life may be an experiment and not a duty, not a
fatality, not a deceit![221] Life--that means for us to transform
constantly into light and flame all that we are, and also all that we
meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise.[222] To be natural again, to
dare to be as immoral as nature is; to be such pagans as were the Greeks
of the Homeric age, to say Yea to life, even to its suffering; to win
back some of that mountain-air Dionysian spirit which took pleasure in
the tragic, nay, which invented tragedy as the expression of its
super-abundant vitality, as the expression of its welcome of even the
cruelest and most terrible elements of life![223] To be healthy once
more!
For there is no other virtue than health, vigor, energy. All virtues
should be looked upon as physiological conditions, and moral judgments
are symptoms of physiological prosperity or the reverse. Indeed, it
might be worth while to try to see whether a scientific order of values
might not be constructed according to a scale of numbers and measures
representing energy. All other values are matters of prejudice,
simplicity, and misunderstanding.[224] Instead of moral values let us
use naturalistic values, physiological values; let us say frankly with
Spinoza that virtue and power are one and the same. What is good? All
that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and power itself,
in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?
The feeling that power is increasing, that resistance is being
overcome.[225] This is not orthodox ethics; and perhaps it will not do
for long ears,--though an unspoiled youth would understand it. A healthy
and vigorous boy will look up sarcastically if you ask him, “Do you wish
to become virtuous?”--but ask him, “Do you wish to become stronger than
your comrades?” and he is all eagerness at once.[226] Youth knows that
ability is virtue; watch the athletic field. Youth is not at home in the
class room, because there knowledge is estranged from action; and youth
measures the height of what a man knows by the depth of his power to
do.[227] There is a better gospel in the boy on the field than in the
man in the pulpit.
Which of the boys whom we know do we love best in our secret hearts--the
prayerful Aloysius, or the masterful leader of the urchins in the
street? We moralize and sermonize in mean efforts to bring the young
tyrant down to our virtuous anæmia; but we know that we are wrong, and
respect him most when he stands his ground most firmly. To require of
strength that it should express itself as weakness is just as absurd as
to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.[228]
Let us go to school to our children, and we shall understand that all
native propensities are beneficent, that the evil impulses are to a far
view as necessary and preservative as the good.[229] In truth we worship
youth because at its finest it is a free discharge of instinctive
strength; and we know that happiness is nothing else than that. To
abandon instinct, to deliberate, to clog action with conscious
thought,--that is to achieve old age. After all, nothing can be done
perfectly so long as it is done consciously; consciousness is a defect
to be overcome.[230] Instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of
intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.[231] Genius lies in
the instincts; goodness too; all consciousness is theatricality.[232]
When a people begins to worship reason, it begins to die.[233] Youth
knows better: it follows instinct trustfully, and worships power.
And we worship power too, and should say so were we as honest as our
children. Our gentlest virtues are but forms of power: out of the
abundance of the power of sex come kindness and pity; out of revenge,
justice; out of the love of resistance, bravery. Love is a secret path
to the heart of the powerful, in order to become his master; gratitude
is revenge of a lofty kind; self-sacrifice is an attempt to share in the
power of him to whom the sacrifice is made. Honor is the acknowledgment
of an equal power; praise is the pride of the judge; all conferring of
benefits is an exercise of power.[234] Behold a man in distress:
straightway the compassionate ones come to him, depict his misfortune to
him, at last go away, satisfied and elevated; they have gloated over the
unhappy man’s misfortune and their own; they have spent a pleasant
Sunday afternoon.[235] So with the scientist and the philosopher: in
their thirst for knowledge lurks the lust of gain and conquest. And the
cry of the oppressed for freedom is again a cry for power.[236]
You cannot understand man, you cannot understand society, until you
learn to see in all things this will to power. Physiologists should
bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation
as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above
all to discharge its strength: self-preservation is only one of the
results of this. And psychologists should think twice before saying that
happiness or pleasure is the motive of all action. Pleasure is but an
incident of the restless search for power; happiness is an accompanying,
not an actuating, factor. The feeling of happiness lies precisely in the
discontentedness of the will, in the fact that without opponents and
obstacles it is never satisfied. Man is now master of the forces of
nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings; in
comparison with primitive man the man of to-day represents an enormous
quantum of power, but not an increase of happiness. How can one
maintain, then, that man has striven after happiness? No; not happiness,
but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but
capacity; that is the secret of man’s longing and man’s seeking.[237]
Let biologists, too, reëxamine the stock-in-trade of their theory. Life
is not the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations, but
will to power, which, proceeding from within, subjugates and
incorporates an ever-increasing quantity of “external phenomena.” All
motive force, all “causation” whatever, is this will to power; there is
no other force, physical, dynamical, or psychical.[238] As to the famous
“struggle for existence,” it seems at present to be more of an
assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception; and it is
due not to a desire for food but _à tergo_ to a surcharge of energy
demanding discharge. The general condition of life is not one of want
or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of
absurd prodigality; where there is a struggle it is a struggle for
power. We must not confound Malthus with Nature.[239] One does indeed
find the “cruelty of Nature” which is so often referred to, but in a
different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and
well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the
lowly. Darwin sees selection in favor of the stronger, the
better-constituted. Precisely the reverse stares one in the face: the
suppression of the lucky cases, the reversion to average, the
uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery
of the mediocre. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read
thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures; the
will to nonentity prevails over the will to life. We have to beware of
this formulation of reality into a moral.[240]
No; morality is not mediocrity, it is superiority; it does not mean
being like most people, but being better, stronger, more capable than
most people. It does not mean timidity: if anything is virtue it is to
stand unafraid in the presence of any prohibition.[241] It does not mean
the pursuit of ends sanctified by society; it means the will to your own
ends, and to the means to them. It means behaving as states
behave,--with frank abandonment of all altruistic pretence. Corporate
bodies are intended to do that which individuals have not the courage to
do: for this reason all communities are vastly more upright and
instructive as regards the nature of man than individuals, who are too
cowardly to have the courage of their desires. All altruism is the
prudence of the private man; societies are not mutually altruistic.
Altruism and life are incompatible: all the forces and instincts which
are the source of life lie stagnant beneath the ban of the old morality.
But real morality is certainty of instinct, effectiveness of action; it
is any action which increases the power of a man or of men; it is an
expression of ascendent and expanding life; it is achievement; it is
power.[242]
8
_The Superman_
With such a morality you breed men who are men; and to breed men who are
men is all that your “social problem” comes to. This does not mean that
the whole race is to be improved: the very last thing a sensible man
would promise to accomplish would be to improve mankind. Mankind does
not improve, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much
more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all
ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail. To say that
the social problem consists in a general raising of the average standard
of comfort and ability amounts to abandoning the problem; there is as
little prospect of mankind’s attaining to a higher order as there is for
the ant and the ear-wig to enter into kinship with God and eternity. The
most fundamental of all errors here lies in regarding the many, the
herd, as an aim instead of the individual: the herd is only a means. The
road to perfection lies in the bringing forth of the most powerful
individuals, for whose use the great masses would be converted into mere
tools, into the most intelligent and flexible tools possible. Every
human being, with his total activity, has dignity and significance only
so far as he is, consciously or unconsciously, a tool in the service of
a superior individual. All that can be done is to produce here and
there, now and then, such a superior individual, _l’uomo singulare_, the
higher man, the superman. The problem does not concern what humanity as
a whole or as a species is to accomplish, but what kind of man is to be
desired as highest in value, what kind of man is to be worked for and
bred. To produce the superman: that is the social problem. If this is
not understood, nothing is understood.[243]
Now what would such a man be like? Shall we try to picture him?
We see him as above all a lover of life: strong enough, too, to love
life without deceiving himself about it. There is no _memento mori_
here; rather a _memento vivere_; rich instincts call for much living. A
hard man, loving danger and difficulty: what does not kill him, he
feels, leaves him stronger. Pleasure--pleasure as it is understood by
the rich--is repugnant to him: he seeks not pleasure but work, not
happiness but responsibility and achievement. He does not make
philosophy an excuse for living prudently and apart, an artifice for
withdrawing successfully from the game of life; he does not stand aside
and merely look on; he puts his shoulder to the wheel; for him it is the
essence of philosophy to feel the obligation and burden of a hundred
attempts and temptations, the joy of a hundred adventures; he risks
himself constantly; he plays out to the end this bad game.[244]
To risk and to create, this is the meaning of life to the superman. He
could not bear to be a man, if man could not be a poet, a maker. To
change every “It was” into a “Thus I would have it!”--in this he finds
that life may redeem itself. He is moved not by ambition but by a mighty
overflowing spendthrift spirit that drives him on; he must remake; for
this he compels all things to come to him and into him, in order that
they may flow back from him as gifts of his love and his abundance; in
this refashioning of things by thought he sees the holiness of life; the
greatest events, he knows, are these still creative hours.[245]
He is a man of contrasts, or contradictions; he does not desire to be
always the same man; he is a multitude of elements and of men; his value
lies precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in the
variety of burdens which he can bear, in the extent to which he can
stretch his responsibility; in him the antagonistic character of
existence is represented and justified. He loves instinct, knows that it
is the fountain of all his energies; but he knows, too, the natural
delight of æsthetic natures in measure, the pleasure of self-restraint,
the exhilaration of the rider on a fiery steed. He is a selective
principle, he rejects much; he reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli,
with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in
him; he tests the approaching stimulus. He decides slowly; but he holds
firmly to a decision made.[246]
He loves and has the qualities which the folk call virtues, but he loves
too and shows the qualities which the folk call vices; it is again in
this union of opposites that he rises above mediocrity; he is a broad
arch that spans two banks lying far apart. The folk on either side fear
him; for they cannot calculate on him, or classify him. He is a free
spirit, an enemy of all fetters and labels; he belongs to no party,
knowing that the man who belongs to a party perforce becomes a liar. He
is a sceptic (not that he must appear to be one); freedom from any kind
of conviction is a necessary factor in his strength of will. He does not
make propaganda or proselytes; he keeps his ideals to himself as
distinctions; his opinion is his opinion: another person has not easily
a right to it; he has renounced the bad taste of wishing to agree with
many people. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody; like
everything profound, he loves the mask; he does not descend to
familiarity; and is not familiar when people think he is. If he cannot
lead, he walks alone.[247]
He has not only intellect; if that were all it would not be enough; he
has blood. Behind him is a lineage of culture and ability; lives of
danger and distinction; his ancestors have paid the price for what he
is, just as most men pay the price for what their ancestors have been.
Naturally, then, he has a strong feeling of distance; he sees inequality
and gradation, order and rank, everywhere among men. He has the most
aristocratic of virtues: intellectual honesty. He does not readily
become a friend or an enemy; he honors only his equals, and therefore
cannot be the enemy of many; where one despises one cannot wage war. He
lacks the power of easy reconciliation; but “retaliation” is as
incomprehensible to him as “equal rights.” He remains just even as
regards his injurer; despite the strong provocation of personal insult
the clear and lofty objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose
glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled. He recognizes
duties only to his equals; to others he does what he thinks best; he
knows that justice is found only among equals. He has that distinctively
aristocratic trait, the ability to command and with equal readiness to
obey; that is indispensable to his pride. He will not permit himself to
be praised; he does what serves his purpose. The essence of him is that
he has a purpose, for which he will not hesitate to run all risks, even
to sacrifice men, to bend their backs to the worst. That something may
exist which is a hundred times more important than the question whether
he feels well or unwell, and therefore too whether the others feel well
or unwell: this is a fundamental instinct of his nature. To have a
purpose, and to cleave to it through all dangers till it be
achieved,--that is his great passion, that is himself.[248]
9
_How to Make Supermen_
It is our task, then, to procreate this synthetic man, who embodies
everything and justifies it, and for whom the rest of mankind is but
soil; to bring the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, within and
without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of
nature. In this cultivation lies the meaning of culture: the direction
of all life to the end of producing the finest possible individuals.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; his very
essence is to create a being higher than himself; that is the instinct
of procreation, the instinct of action and of work. Even the higher man
himself feels this need of begetting; and for lesser men all virtue and
morals lie in preparing the way that the superman may come. There is no
greater horror than the degenerating soul which says, “All for myself.”
In this great purpose, too, is the essence of a better religion, and a
surpassing of the bounds of narrow individualism; with this purpose
there come moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light
we understand the word “I” no longer; we feel that we are creating, and
therefore in a sense becoming, something greater than ourselves.[249]
How to make straight the way for the superman?
First by reforming marriage. Let it be understood at once that love is a
hindrance rather than a help to such marriages as are calculated to
breed higher men. To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to
regard it falsely; that is why love-marriages are from the social point
of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony. Were there a
benevolent God, the marriages of men would cause him more displeasure
than anything else; he would observe that all buyers are careful, but
that even the most cunning one buys his wife in a sack; and surely he
would cause the earth to tremble in convulsions when a saint and a goose
couple. When a man is in love, he should not be allowed to come to a
decision about his life, and to determine once for all the character of
his lifelong society on account of a whim. If we treated marriage
seriously, we would publicly declare invalid the vows of lovers, and
refuse them permission to marry. We would remake public opinion, so that
it would encourage trial marriage; we would exact certificates of health
and good ancestry; we would punish bachelorhood by longer military
service, and would reward with all sorts of privileges those fathers who
should lavish sons upon the world. And above all we would make people
understand that the purpose of marriage is not that they should
duplicate, but that they should surpass, themselves. Perhaps we would
read to them from _Zarathustra_, with fitting ceremonies and
solemnities: “Thou art young, and wishest for child and marriage. But I
ask thee, art thou a man who dareth to wish for a child? Art thou the
victorious one, the self-subduer, the commander of thy senses, the
master of thy virtues?--or in thy wish doth there speak the animal, or
necessity? Or solitude? Or discord with thyself? I would that thy
victory and freedom were longing for a child. Thou shalt build living
monuments unto thy victory and thy liberation. Thou shalt build beyond
thyself. But first thou must build thyself square in body and soul. Thou
shalt not only propagate thyself, but propagate thyself upward!
Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create that one which is more
than they who created it. I call marriage reverence unto each other as
unto those who will such a will.”[250]
In a word, eugenic marriage; and after eugenic marriage, rigorous
education. But interest in education will become powerful only when
belief in a God and his care have been abandoned, just as medicine began
to flourish only when the belief in miraculous cures had lapsed. When
men begin at last to _believe_ in education, they will endure much
rather than have their sons miss going to a good and hard school at the
proper time. What is it that one learns in a hard school? To obey and to
command. For this is what distinguishes hard schooling, as good
schooling, from every other schooling, namely that a good deal is
demanded, severely exacted; that excellence is required as if it were
normal; that praise is scanty, that leniency is non-existent; that blame
is sharp, practical, and without reprieve, and has no regard to talent
and antecedents. To prefer danger to comfort; not to weigh in a
tradesman’s balance what is permitted and what is forbidden; to be more
hostile to pettiness, slyness, and parasitism than to wickedness;--we
are in every need of a school where these things would be taught. Such a
school would allow its pupils to learn productively, by living and
doing; it would not subject them to the tyranny of books and the weight
of the past; it would teach them less about the past and more about the
future; it would teach them the future of humanity as depending on human
will, on _their_ will; it would prepare the way for and be a part of a
vast enterprise in breeding and education.[251] But even such a school
would not provide all that is necessary in education. Not all should
receive the same training and the same care; select groups must be
chosen, and special instruction lavished on them; the greatest success,
however, will remain for the man who does not seek to educate either
everybody or certain limited circles, but only one single individual.
The last century was superior to ours precisely because it possessed so
many individually educated men.
10
_On the Necessity of Exploitation_
And next slavery.
This is one of those ugly words which are the _verba non grata_ of
modern discussion, because they jar us so ruthlessly out of the grooves
of our thinking. Nevertheless it is clear to all but those to whom
self-deception is the staff of life, that as the honest Greeks had it,
some are born to be slaves. Try to educate all men equally, and you
become the laughing-stock of your own maturity. The masses seem to be
worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men,
printed on bad paper from worn-out plates; next as a contrast to the
great men; and lastly as their tools. Living consists in living at the
cost of others: the man who has not grasped this fact has not taken the
first step towards truth to himself. And to consider distress of all
kinds as an objection, as something which must be done away with, is the
greatest nonsense on earth; almost as mad as the will to abolish bad
weather, out of pity to the poor, so to speak. The masses must be used,
whether that means or does not mean that they must suffer;--it requires
great strength to live and forget how far life and injustice are one.
What is the suffering of whole peoples compared to the creative agonies
of great individuals?[252]
There are many who threw away everything they were worth when they threw
away their slavery. In all respects slaves live more securely and more
happily than modern laborers; the laborer chooses his harder lot to
satisfy the vanity of telling himself that he is not a slave. These men
are dangerous; not because they are strong, but because they are sick;
it is the sick who are the greatest danger to the healthy; it is the
weak ones, they who mouth so much about their sickness, who vomit bile
and call it newspaper,--it is they who instil the most dangerous venom
and scepticism into our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves; it is
they who most undermine the life beneath our feet. It is for such as
these that Christianity may serve a good purpose (so serving our purpose
too). Those qualities which are within the grasp only of the strongest
and most terrible natures, and which make their existence
possible--leisure, adventure, disbelief, and even dissipation--would
necessarily ruin mediocre natures--and does do so when they possess
them. In the case of the latter, industry, regularity, moderation, and
strong “conviction” are in their proper place--in short, all “gregarious
virtues”; under their influence these mediocre men become perfect. We
good Europeans, then, though atheists and immoralists, will take care to
support the religions and the morality which are associated with the
gregarious instinct; for by means of them an order of men is, so to
speak, prepared, which must at some time or other fall into our hands,
which must actually crave for our hands.[253]
Slavery, let us understand it well, is the necessary price of culture;
the free work, or art, of some involves the compulsory labor of others.
As in the organism so in society: the higher function is possible only
through the subjection of the lower functions. A high civilization is a
pyramid; it can stand only on a broad base, its first prerequisite is a
strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. In order that there may be
a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the
enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly
subjected. At their cost, through the surplus of their labor, that
privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in
order to create and to satisfy a new world of want. The misery of the
toilers must still increase in order to make the production of a world
of art possible to a small number of Olympian men.[254]
11
_Aristocracy_
The greatest folly of the strong is to let the weak make them ashamed to
exploit, to let the weak suggest to them, “It is a shame to be
happy--there is too much misery!” Let us therefore reaffirm the right of
the happy to existence, the right of bells with a full tone over bells
that are cracked and discordant. Not that exploitation as such is
desirable; it is good only where it supports and develops an aristocracy
of higher men who are themselves developing still higher men. This
philosophy aims not at an individualistic morality but at a new order of
rank. In this age of universal suffrage, in this age in which everybody
is allowed to sit in judgment upon everything and everybody, one feels
compelled to reëstablish the order of rank. The higher men must be
protected from contamination and suffocation by the lower. The richest
and most complex forms perish so easily! Only the lowest succeed in
maintaining their apparent imperishableness.[255]
The first question as to the order of rank: how far is a man disposed to
be solitary or gregarious? If he is disposed to be gregarious, his value
consists in those qualities which secure the survival of his tribe or
type; if he is disposed to be solitary, his qualities are those which
distinguish him from others; hence the important consequence: the
solitary type should not be valued from the standpoint of the gregarious
type, or _vice versa_. Viewed from above, both types are necessary; and
so is their antagonism. Degeneration lies in the approximation of the
qualities of the herd to those of the solitary creature, and _vice
versa_; in short, in their beginning to resemble each other. Hence the
difference in their virtues, their rights and their obligations; in the
light of this difference one comes to abhor the vulgarity of Stuart Mill
when he says, “What is right for one man is right for another.” It is
not; what is right for the herd is precisely what is wrong for their
leaders; and what is right for the leaders is wrong for the herd. The
leaders use, the herd is used; the virtues of either lie in the
efficiency here of leadership, there of service. Slave-morality is one
thing, and master-morality another.[256]
And leadership of course requires an aristocracy. Let us repeat it:
democracy has always been the death-agony of the power of organization
and direction; these require great aristocratic families, with long
traditions of administration and leadership; old ancestral lines that
guarantee for many generations the duration of the necessary will and
the necessary instincts. Not only aristocracy, then, but caste; for if a
man have plebeian ancestors, his soul will be a plebeian soul;
education, discipline, culture will be wasted on him, merely enabling
him to become a great liar. Therefore intermarriage, even social
intercourse of leaders with herd, is to be avoided with all precaution
and intolerance; too much intercourse with barbarians ruined the Romans,
and will ruin any noble race.[257]
In what direction may one turn with any hope of finding even the
aspiration for such an aristocracy? Only there where a _noble_ attitude
of mind prevails, an attitude of mind which believes in slavery and in
manifold orders of rank, as the prerequisites of any higher degree of
culture. Men with this attitude of mind will insistently call for, and
will at last produce, philosophical men of power, artist-tyrants,--a
higher kind of men which, thanks to their preponderance of will,
knowledge, riches, and influence, will avail themselves of democratic
Europe as the most suitable and subtle instrument for taking the fate of
Europe into their hands, and working as artists upon man himself. The
fundamental belief of these great desirers will be that society must not
be allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as the foundation and
scaffolding by means of which a select class of beings may be able to
elevate themselves to their highest duties, and in general to a higher
existence: like those sun-climbing plants in Java which encircle an oak
so long and so often with their arms that at last, high above it, but
supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and
exhibit their happiness.[258]
12
_Signs of Ascent_
Are we moving toward such a consummation? Can we detect about us any
signs of this ascending movement of life? Not signs of “progress”; that
is another narcotic, like Christianity,--good for slaves, but to be
avoided by those who rule. Man as a species is not progressing; the
general level of the species is not raised. But humanity as mass
sacrificed to the prosperity of the one stronger type of Man,--that
_would be_ a progress.[259]
Progress of this kind, to some degree, there has always been. The ruling
class in Greece, as seen in Homer and even in Thucydides (though with
Socrates degeneration begins), is an example of this kind of progress or
attainment. Imagine this culture, which has its poet in Sophocles, its
statesman in Pericles, its physician in Hippocrates, its natural
philosopher in Democritus; here is a yea-saying, a gratitude, to life in
all its manifestations; here life is understood, and covered with art
that it may be borne; here men are frivolous so that they may forget for
a moment the arduousness and perilousness of their task; they are
superficial, but from profundity; they exalt philosophers who preach
moderation, because they themselves are so immoderate, so instinctive,
so hilariously wild; they are great, they are elevated above any ruling
class before or after them because here the morals of the governing
caste have grown up among the governing caste, and not among the
herd.[260]
We catch some of the glory of these Greeks in the men of the
Renaissance: men perfect in their immorality, terrible in their demands;
we should not dare to stand amid the conditions which produced these
men and which these men produced; we should not even dare to imagine
ourselves in those conditions: our nerves would not endure that
reality,--not to speak of our muscles. One man of their type,
continuator and development of their type, brother (as Taine most
rightly says) of Dante and Michelangelo,--one such man we have known
with less of the protection of distance; and he was too hard to bear.
That _Ens Realissimum_, synthesis of monster and superman, surnamed
Napoleon! The first man, and the man of greatest initiative and
developed views, of modern times; a man of tolerance, not out of
weakness, but out of strength, able to risk the full enjoyment of
naturalness and be strong enough for this freedom. In such a man we see
something in the nature of “disinterestedness” in his work on his
marble, whatever be the number of men that are sacrificed in the
process. Men were glad to serve him; as most normal men are glad to
serve the great man; the crowd was tired of “equal rights,” tired of
being masterless; it longed to worship genius again. What was the excuse
for that terrible farce, the French Revolution? It made men ready for
Napoleon.[261]
When shall we produce another superman? Let us go back to our question:
Can we detect about us any signs of strength?
Yes. We are learning to get along without God. We are recovering from
the noble sentiments of Rousseau. We are giving the body its due;
physiology is overcoming theology. We are less hungry for lies,--we are
facing squarely some of the ugliness of life,--prostitution, for
example. We speak less of “duty” and “principles”; we are not so
enamored of bourgeois conventions. We are less ashamed of our instincts;
we no longer believe in a right which proceeds from a power that is
unable to uphold it. There is an advance towards “naturalness”: in all
political questions, even in the relations between parties, even in
merchants’, workmen’s circles only questions of power come into play;
what one can do is the first question, what one ought to do is a
secondary consideration. There is a certain degree of liberal-mindedness
regarding morality; where this is most distinctly wanting we regard its
absence as a sign of a morbid condition (Carlyle, Ibsen, Schopenhauer);
if there is anything which can reconcile us to our age it is precisely
the amount of immorality which it allows itself without falling in its
own estimation.[262]
Modern science, despite its narrowing specialization, is a sign of
ascent. Here is strictness in service, inexorability in small matters as
well as great, rapidity in weighing, judging, and condemning; the
hardest is demanded here, the best is done without reward of praise or
distinction; it is rather as among soldiers,--almost nothing but blame
and sharp reprimand is _heard_; for doing well prevails here as the
rule, and the rule has, as everywhere, a silent tongue. It is the same
with this “severity of science” as with the manners and politeness of
the best society: it frightens the uninitiated. He, however, who is
accustomed to it, does not like to live anywhere but in this clear,
transparent, powerful, and highly electrified atmosphere, this _manly_
atmosphere.[263]
In this achievement of science lies such an opportunity as philosophy
has never had before. Science traces the course of things but points to
no goal: what it does give consists of the fundamental facts upon which
the new goal must be based. All the sciences have now to pave the way
for the future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to
mean that he must solve the problem of _value_, that he has to fix the
hierarchy of values. He must become lawgiver, commander; he must
determine the “whither” and “why” for mankind. All knowledge must be at
his disposal, and must serve him as a tool for creation.[264]
Most certain of the signs of a reascending movement of life is the
development of militarism. The military development of Europe is a
delightful surprise. This fine discipline is teaching us to do our duty
without expecting praise. Universal military service is the curious
antidote which we possess for the effeminacy of democratic ideas. Men
are learning again the joy of living in danger. Some of them are even
learning the old truth that war is good in itself, aside from any gain
in land or other wealth; instead of saying “A good cause will hallow
every war,” they learn to say “A good war hallows every cause.” When the
instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and conquest, it
is decadent: it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. A
state which should prevent war would not only be committing suicide (for
war is just as necessary to the state as the slave is to society); it
would be hostile to life, it would be an outrage on the future of man.
The maintenance of the military state is the last means of adhering to
the great traditions of the past; or where it has been lost, of reviving
it. Only in this can the superior or strong type of man be
preserved.[265]
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men, and
then to get around them. The state is the organization of immorality for
the attainment of this purpose. But as existing to-day the state is a
very imperfect instrument, subject at any moment to democratic
foundering. What concerns the thinker here is the slow and hesitant
formation of a united Europe. This was the thought, and the sole real
work and impulse, of the only broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this
century,--the tentative effort to anticipate the future of “the
European.” Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they
fall back again into the national narrowness of the “Fatherlanders”--then
they were once more “patriots.” One thinks here of men like Napoleon,
Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. And after all, is
there a single idea behind this bovine nationalism? What possible value
can there be in encouraging this arrogant self-conceit when everything
to-day points to greater and more common interests?--at a moment when
the spiritual dependence and denationalization which are obvious to all
are paving the way for the _rapprochements_ and fertilizations which
make up the real value and sense of present-day culture?[266]
What an instrument such a united Europe would be for the development and
protection and expression of superior individuals! What a buoyant ascent
of life after this long descent into democracy! See now, in review, the
two movements which we have studied and on which we have strung our
philosophy: on the one hand Christian mythology and morality, the cult
of weakness, the fear of life, the deterioration of the species, ever
increasing suppression of the privileged and the strong, the lapse into
democracy, feminism, socialism, and at last into anarchy,--all
terminating in pessimism, despair, total loss of the love of life; on
the other hand the reaffirmation of the worth of life, the resolute
distinction between slave-morality and master-morality, the recognition
of the aristocratic valuation of health, vigor, energy, as moral in all
their forms, and of the will to power as the source and significance of
all action and all living; the conception of the higher man, of the
exceptional individual, as the goal of human endeavor; the redirection
of marriage, of education, of social structure, to the fostering and
cherishing of these higher types;--culminating in the supernational
organization of Europe as the instrumentality and artistic expression of
the superior man.[267]
Is this philosophy too hard to bear? Very well. But those races that
cannot bear it are doomed; and those which regard it as the greatest
blessing are destined to be masters of the world.[268]
IV
Criticism
What shall one say to this? What would a democrat say,--such a democrat
as would be a friend to socialism and feminism, and even to
anarchism,--and a lover of Jesus? One pictures such a man listening with
irritated patience to the foregoing, and responding very readily to an
invitation to take the floor.
* * * * *
There are lessons here, he begins, as if brushing away an initial
encumbrance. There is something of Nietzsche in all of us, just as there
is something of Jesus (almost as there is something of man and of woman
in all of us, as Weininger argued); and part of that crowd called
_myself_ is flattered by this doctrine of ruthless power. Nietzsche
stood outside our social and moral structure, he was a sort of hermit in
the world of thought; and so he could see things in that structure which
are too near to our noses for easy vision. And as you listen to him you
see history anew as a long succession of masterings and enslavings and
deceivings, and you become almost reconciled to the future being nothing
but a further succession of the same. And then you begin to see that if
the future is to be different, one of the things we must do is to pinch
ourselves out of this Nietzschean dream.
And a good way to begin is with Nietzsche’s own principle, that every
philosophy is a physiology.[269] He asks us to believe that there is no
such thing as a morbid trait in him,[270] but we must not take him at
his word. The most important point about this philosophy is that it was
written by a sick man, a man sick to the very roots--if you will let me
say it, abnormal in sexual constitution; a man not sufficiently
attracted to the other sex, because he has so much of the other sex in
him. “She is a woman,” he writes in _Zarathustra_, “and never loves
anyone but a warrior”; that is, if Nietzsche but knew it, the diagnosis
of his own disease. This hatred of women, this longing for power, this
admiration for strength, for successful lying,[271] this inability to
see a _tertium quid_ between tyranny and slavery,[272]--all these are
feminine traits. A stronger man would not have been so shrewishly shrill
about woman and Christianity; a stronger man would have needed less
repetition, less emphasis and underlining, less of italics and
exclamation points; a stronger man would have been more gentle, and
would have smiled where Nietzsche scolds. It is the philosophy, you see,
of a man abnormally weak in the social instincts, and at the same time
lacking in proper outlet for such social instincts as nature has left
him.
Consequently, he never gets beyond the individual. He thinks society is
made up of individuals, when it is really made up of groups. He supposes
that the only virtues a man can have are those which help him as an
isolated unit; the idea that a man may find self-expression in social
expression, in coöperation, that there are virtues which are virtues
because they enable one to work with others against a common evil,--this
notion never occurs to him. He does not see that sympathy and mutual
aid, for example, though they preserve some inferior individuals, yet
secure that group-solidarity, and therefore group-survival, without
which even the strong ones would perish.[273] He does not imagine that
perhaps the barbarians who invaded Rome needed the gospel of a “gentle
Jesus meek and mild” if anything at all was to remain of that same
classical culture which he paints so lovingly.[274] He laughs at
self-denial; and then invites you to devote yourself forever to some
self-elected superman.
This philosophy of aristocracy, of the necessity of slavery, of the
absurdity of democracy,--of course it is exciting to all weak people who
would like to have power,--and who have not read it all before in Plato.
In this particular case the humor of the situation lies in the very
powerful attack which Nietzsche makes on the irreligious religious
humbug which has proved one of the chief instruments of mastery in the
hands of the class whose power he is trying to strengthen. “I hope to be
forgiven,” says Nietzsche, “for discovering that all moral philosophy
hitherto has belonged to the soporific appliances.”[275]
“Discovering”--as if the aristocracy had not known that all along!
“Here is a naïve bookworm,” these “strong men” will say among
themselves, “who has discovered what every one of us knows. He presumes
to tell us how to increase our power, and he can find no better way of
helping us than to expose in print the best secrets of our trade.”
Just in this lies the value of Nietzsche, as Rousseau said of
Machiavelli: he lets us in behind the scenes of the drama of
exploitation. We know better now the men with whom democracy must deal.
We see the greed for power that hides behind the contention that culture
cannot exist without slavery. Grant that contention: so much the worse
for culture! If culture means the increasing concentration of the
satisfactions of life in the hands of a few “superior” pigs, their
culture may be dispensed with; if it is to stay, it will have to mean
the direction of knowledge and ability to the spread of the
satisfactions of life. Which is finer,--the relationship of master and
slave, or that of friend and friend? Surely a world of people liking and
helping one another is a finer world to live in than one in which the
instincts of aggression are supreme. And such a coöperative civilization
need not fear the tests of survival; selection puts an ever higher
premium on solidarity, an ever lower value on pugnacity. Intelligence,
not ready anger, will win the great contests of the future. Friendship
will pay.
The history of the world is a record of the patient and planful attempt
to replace hatred by understanding, narrowness by large vision,
opposition by coöperation, slavery by friendship. Friendship: a word to
be avoided by those who would appear _blasé_. But let us repeat it;
words have been known to nourish deeds which without them might never
have grown into reality. Some find heaven in making as many men as
possible their slaves; others find heaven in making as many men as
possible their friends. Which type of man will we have? Which type of
man, if abundant, would make this world a splendor and a delight?
The hope for which Jesus lived was that _man_ might some day come to
mean _friend_. It is the only hope worth living for.
V
Nietzsche Replies
“It is certainly not the least charm of a theory,” says Nietzsche, “that
it is refutable.”[276] But “what have I to do with mere
refutations?”[277] “A prelude I am of better players.”[278] “Verily, I
counsel you,” said Zarathustra, “depart from me and defend yourselves
against Zarathustra! And better still, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he
hath deceived you. The man of perception must not only be able to love
his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One ill requiteth one’s
teacher by always remaining only his scholar. Why will ye not pluck at
my wreath? Ye revere me; but how if your reverence one day falleth down?
Beware of being crushed to death with a statue! Ye say ye believe in
Zarathustra? But what is Zarathustra worth? Ye are my faithful ones; but
what are all faithful ones worth? When ye had not yet sought yourselves
ye found me. Thus do all faithful ones; hence all belief is worth so
little. Now I ask you to lose me and find yourselves; not until all of
you have disowned me shall I return unto you.”[279]
VI
Conclusion
“Look,” says Rudin, in Turgenev’s story, “you see that apple tree? It
has broken down with the weight and multitude of its own fruit. It is
the emblem of genius.” “To perish beneath a load one can neither bear
nor throw off,” wrote Nietzsche,--“that is a philosopher.”[280] I shall
announce the song of the lightning, said Zarathustra, and perish in the
announcing.[281]
Insanity with such a man is but a matter of time; he feels it coming
upon him; he values his hours like a man condemned to execution. In
twenty days he writes the _Genealogy of Morals_; in one year (1888) he
produces _The Twilight of the Idols_, _Antichrist_, _The Case of
Wagner_, _Ecce Homo_, and his longest and greatest book, _The Will to
Power_. He not only writes these books; he reads the proof-sheets,
straining his eyes beyond repair. He is almost blind now; he is
deceived, taken advantage of, because he can hardly see farther than his
touch. “If I were blind,” he writes pitifully, “I should be
healthy.”[282] Yet his body is racked with pain: “on 118 days this year
I have had severe attacks.”[283] “I have given a name to my pain, and
call it ‘a dog’--it is just as pitiful, just as importunate and
shameless; and I can domineer over it, vent my bad humor on it, as
others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”[284]
Meanwhile the world lives on unnoticing, or noticing only to
misunderstand. “My foes have become mighty, and have so distorted my
teaching, that my best beloved must be ashamed of the gifts that I gave
them.”[285] He learns that the libertines of Europe are using his
philosophy as a cloak for their sins: “I can read in their faces that
they totally misunderstand me, and that it is only the animal in them
which rejoices at being able to cast off its fetters.”[286] He finds one
whom he thinks to make his disciple; he is buoyed up for a few days by
the hope; the hope is shattered, and loneliness closes in once more upon
him. “A kingdom for a kind word!” he cries out in the depth of his
longing; and again he writes, “For years no milk of human kindness, no
breath of love.”[287]
In December, 1888, one whom he has thought friendly writes that his
brother-in-law is sending to a magazine an attack on him. It is the last
blow; it means that his sister has joined the others in deserting him.
“I take one sleeping-draught after another to deaden the pain, but for
all that I cannot sleep. To-day I will take such a dose that I will lose
my wits.”[288] He has been taking chloral, and worse drugs, to pay for
the boon of sleep; the poison tips the scale already made heavy by his
blindness and eye-strain, by his loneliness, by the treachery of his
friends, by his general bodily ailments; he wakes up from this final
draught in a stupor from which he never recovers; he writes to Brandes
and signs himself “The Crucified”; he wanders into the street, is
tormented by children, falls in a fit; his good landlord helps him back
to his room, sends for the simple, ignorant doctor of the neighborhood;
but it is too late; the man is insane. Age, forty-four; another--the
only name greater than his among modern philosophers--had died at that
pitifully early age.
The body lingered eleven years behind the mind. Death came in 1900. He
was buried as he had wished: “Promise me,” he had asked his sister, many
years before, “that when I die only my friends shall stand about my
coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else
utters falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer defend myself;
and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.”[289]
After his death the world began to read him. As in so many cases the
life had to be given that the doctrine might be heard. “Only where there
are graves,” he had written in _Zarathustra_, “are there
resurrections.”[290]
PART II
SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER I
SOLUTIONS AND DISSOLUTIONS
I
The Problem
And so we come through our five episodes in the history of the
reconstructive mind, and find ourselves in the bewildering present,
comfortably seated, let us say, in the great reading room of our
Columbia Library. An attendant liberates us from the maze of
“Nietzsche’s Works” lying about us, and returns presently with a stack
of thirty books purporting to give the latest developments in the field
of social study and research. We are soon lost in their graphs and
statistics, their records and results; gradually we come to feel beneath
these dead facts the lives they would reveal; and as we read we see a
picture.
* * * * *
It is the picture of one life. We see it beginning helplessly in the
arms of the factory physician; it is only after some violence that it
consents to breathe,--as if it hesitates to enter upon its adventure. It
has a touch of consumption but is otherwise a fair enough baby, says the
factory physician. It will do,--not saying for what or whom. Luckily,
it is a boy, and will be able to work soon. He does; at the age of nine
he becomes a newsboy; he is up at five in the morning and peddles news
till eight; at nine he gets to school, fagged out but restless; he gives
trouble; cannot memorize quickly enough, nor sit still long enough;
plays truant, loving the hard lessons of the street; school over, he has
a half-hour of play, but must then travel his news route till six; after
supper he has no taste for study; if he cannot go down into the street,
he will go to bed. At fourteen, hating the school where he is beaten or
scolded daily, he connives with his parents at certain falsehoods which
secure his premature entrance into the factory. He works hard, and for a
time happily enough; there is more freedom here than in the school. He
discovers sex, passes through the usual chapter of accidents, and
finally achieves manhood in the form of a sexual disease. He falls in
love several times, and out as many times but one; he marries, shares
his disease with his wife, and begets ten children,--nearly all of them
feeble, and two of them blind; he does not want so many children, but
the priest has told him that religion commands it. He works harder to
support them, but his health is giving way, and life becomes a heavy
burden to him. The factory installs scientific management, and he finds
himself performing the same operation every ten seconds from seven to
twelve and from one to six;--some three thousand times a day; he
protests, but is told that science commands it. He joins a union, and
goes out on strike; his family suffer severely, one of the children
dying of malnutrition; he wins a wage-increase of five per cent; his
landlord raises his rent, and a month later his wife informs him that
the prices of food and clothing have gone up six per cent. His country
goes to war about a piece of territory he has never heard of; his one
fairly strong boy rushes off to the defence of the colors, returns (age
twenty) with one leg and almost an arm, and sits in the house smoking,
drinking, and dribbling in repetitious semi-torpor his memories of
battle. Then comes street-corner talk of socialism, capitalism, and
other things new and therefore hard to understand; a glimmer of hope, a
cloud of doubt, then resignation. Four of the children die before they
are twenty; two others become consumptive weaklings. The father is sent
away from the factory because he is too old and feeble; he finds work in
a saloon; drink helps him to slip down; he steals a bracelet from the
factory-owner’s kept woman, is arrested, tries to hang himself, but is
discovered when half dead, and is restored to life against his will. He
serves his sentence, returns to his family, and becomes a beggar. He
dies of exposure and disease, and his widow is supported by two of his
daughters, who have become successful prostitutes.
It is the picture of one life. And as you look at it you see beyond it
the hundred thousand lives of which it is one; you see this suffering
and meaninglessness as but one hundredth part of a thousandth part of
the meaningless suffering of men; you hear the angry cries of the
rebellious young, the drunken laughter of the older ones who have no
more rebellion in them, the quiet weeping of the mothers of many
children. Around you here you see the happy faces of young students,
eloquent of comfortable homes; at your elbow a gentleman of family is
writing a book on the optimism of Robert Browning. And then suddenly,
beneath this world of leisure and learning, you feel the supporting
brawn of the wearied workers; you vision the very pillars of this vast
edifice held up painfully, hour after hour, on the backs of a million
sweating men; your leisure is their labor, your learning is paid for by
their ignorance, your luxury is their toil.
For a moment the great building seems to tremble, as if rebellion
stirred beneath and upheaval was upon the world. Then it is still once
more, and you and I are here with our thirty books.
One feels guilty of sentiment here (after reading Nietzsche!), and
hurries back to the sober features of those crowded volumes. Here, in
cold scientific statement, is our social problem: here are volumes
biological on heredity, eugenics, dietetics, and disease; volumes
sociological on marriage, prostitution, the family, the position of
woman, contraception and the control of population; volumes
psychological on education, criminology, and the replacement of
supernatural by social religion; volumes economic on private property,
poverty, child labor, industrial methods, arbitration, minimum wage,
trusts, free trade, immigration, prohibition, war; volumes political on
individualism and communism, anarchism and socialism, single tax,
Darwinism and politics, democracy and aristocracy, patriotism,
imperialism, electoral and administrative methods; methodological
volumes on trade-unions and craft-unions, “direct action” and “political
action,” violence and non-resistance, revolution and reform. It is a
discouraging maze; we plunge into it almost hopelessly. Several of these
authors have schemes for taking the social machine apart, and a few even
have schemes for putting it together again; hardly one of them remembers
the old warning that this machine must be kept going while it is being
repaired. And each of these solutions, as its author never suspects, is
but an added problem.
Let us listen to these men for a while, let us follow them for a space,
and see where they bring us out. They may not bring us out at all; but
perhaps that is just what we need to see.
II
“Solutions”
1
_Feminism_
And first, with due propriety, let us listen to the case of woman _vs._
the _status quo_. We imagine the argument as put by a studious and
apparently harmless young lady. She begins gently and proceeds
_crescendo_.
“The case for woman is quite simple; as simple as the case for
democracy. We are human beings, we are governed, we are taxed; and we
believe that just government implies the consent of the governed.
“We might have been content with the old life, had you masters of the
world been content to leave us the old life. But you would not. Your
system of industry has made the position of most young men so hopeless
and insecure that they are year by year putting back the age of
marriage. You have forced us out of our homes into your factories; and
you have used us as a means of making still harder the competition for
employment among the men. Your advocates speak of the sacredness of the
home; and meanwhile you have dragged 5,000,000 English women out of
their homes to be the slaves of your deadening machines.[291] You exalt
marriage; and in this country one woman out of every ten is unmarried,
and one out of every twenty married women works in your unclean shops.
The vile cities born of your factory-system have made life so hard for
us, temptations so frequent, vice so attractive and convenient, that we
cannot grow up among you without suffering some indelible taint.
“Some of us go into your factories because we dread marriage, and some
of us marry because we dread your factories. But there is not much to
choose between them. If we marry we become machines for supplying
another generation of workers and soldiers; and if we talk of
birth-control you arrest us. As if we had no right to all that science
has discovered! And the horror of it is that while you forbid us to
learn how to protect ourselves and our children from the evils of large
families, you yourselves buy this knowledge from your physicians and use
it; and one of your societies for the prevention of birth-control has
been shown to consist of members with an average of 1.5 children per
family.[292] Your physicians meet in learned assemblies and vote in
favor of maintaining the law which forbids the spread of this
information; and then we find that physicians have the smallest average
family in the community.[293] One must be a liar and a thief to fit
comfortably into this civilization which you ask us to defend.
“But we are resolved to get this information; and all your laws to
prevent us will only lessen our respect for law. We will not any longer
bring children into the world unless we have some reasonable hope of
giving them a decent life. And not only that. We shall end, too, the
hypocrisies of marriage. If you will have monogamy you may have it; but
if you continue merely to pretend monogamy we shall find a way of
regaining our independence. We shall not rest until we have freed
ourselves from the sting of your generosity; until our bread comes not
from your hand in kindness but from the state or our employers in
recognition of our work. Then we shall be free to leave you, and you
free to leave us, as we were free to take one another at the
beginning,--so far, alas! as the categorical imperative of love left us
free. And our children will not suffer; better for them that they see us
part than that they live with us in the midst of hypocrisy and secret
war.
“Because we want this freedom--to stay or to go--this freedom to know
and control the vital factors of our lives, therefore we demand equal
suffrage. It is but a little thing, a mere beginning; and beware how you
betray your secrets in your efforts to bar us from this beginning. Are
you afraid to share with us the power of the ballot? Do you confess so
openly that you wish to command us without our consent, that you wish to
use us for your secret ends? You dare not fight fair and in the open? Is
the ballot a weapon which you use on us and will not let us use on you?
It is so you conceive citizenship! Or will you ask us to believe that
you are thinking not of your own interests but of posterity?
“But we shall get this from you, just as we get other things from
you,--by repetition. And then we shall go on to make the world more fit
for women to live in: we shall force open all the avenues of life that
have been closed to us before, making us narrow and petty and dull. We
shall compel your universities to admit us to their classes; we shall
enter your professions, we shall compete with you for office, we shall
win the experiences and dare the adventures which we need to make us
your rivals in literature and philosophy and art. You say we cannot be
your comrades, your friends; that we can be only tyrants or slaves; but
what else can we be, with all the instructive wealth of life kept from
us? You hide from us the great books that are being written to-day, and
then you are surprised at our gossip, our silly scandal-mongering, our
inability to converse with you on business and politics, on science and
religion and philosophy; you will not let us grow, and then you complain
because we are so small. But we want to grow now, we want to grow! We
cannot longer be mothers only. The world does not need so many children;
and even to bring up better children we must have a wider and healthier
life. We must have our intellects stimulated more and our feelings less.
We have burst the bonds of our old narrow world; we must explore
everything now. It is too late to stop us; and if you try you will only
make life a mess of hatred and conflict for us both. And after all, do
you know why we want to grow? It is because we long for the day when we
shall be no longer merely your mistresses, but also your friends.”
2
_Socialism_
Another complainant: a young Socialist: such a man as works far into
almost every night in the dingy office of his party branch, and devotes
his Sundays to _Das Kapital_; bright-eyed, untouched by disillusionment;
fired by the vision of a land of happy comrades.
“I agree with the young lady,” he says; “the source of all our ills is
the capitalist system. It was born of steam-driven machinery and
conceived in _laissez-faire_. It saw the light in Adam Smith’s England,
ruined the health of the men of that country, and then came to America,
where it grew fat on ‘liberty’ and ‘the right to do as one pleases with
one’s own.’ It believed in competition--that is to say war--as its God,
in whom all things lived and moved and sweated dividends; it made the
acquisition of money, by no matter what means, the test of virtue and
success, so that honest men became ashamed of themselves if they did not
fail; it made all life a matter of ‘push’ and ‘pull,’ like the two sides
of a door in one of those business palaces which make its cities great
mazes of brick and stone rising like new Babels in the face of heaven.
Its motto was, Beware of small profits; its aim was the greatest
possible happiness of the smallest possible number. Out of competition
it begot the trust, the rebate, and the ‘gentleman’s agreement’; out of
‘freedom of contract’ it begot wage-slavery; out of ‘liberty, equality
and fraternity’ it begot an industrial feudalism worse than the old
feudalism, based on the inheritance not of land, but of the living
bodies and souls of thousands of men, women and children. When it came
(in 1770) the annual income of England was $600,000,000; in 1901 the
annual income of England was $8,000,000,000; the system has made a
thousand millionaires, but it has left the people starving as
before.[294] It has increased wages, and has increased prices a trifle
more. It has improved the condition of the upper tenth of the workers,
and has thrown the great remaining mass of the workers into a hell of
torpor and despair. It has crowned all by inventing the myopic science
of scientific management, whereby men are made to work at such speed,
and with such rigid uniformity, that the mind is crazed, and the body is
worn out twenty years before its time. It has made the world reek with
poverty, and ugliness, and meanness, and the vulgarity of conspicuous
wealth. It has made life intolerable and disgraceful to all but sheep
and pigs.
“There is only one way of saving our civilization--such as there is of
it--from wasting away through the parasitic degeneration of a few of its
parts and the malnutrition of the rest; and that is by frankly
abandoning this _laissez-faire_ madness, and changing the state into a
mechanism for the management of the nation’s business. We workers must
get hold of the offices, and turn government into administration.
Without that our strikes and boycotts, our ‘direct action’ and economic
organization, arrive at little result; every strike we ‘win’ means that
prices will go up, and our time and energy--and dues--have gone to
nothing but self-discipline in solidarity. We can control prices only by
controlling monopolies; and we can control monopolies only by
controlling government. That means politics, and it’s a scheme that
won’t work until the proletariat get brains enough to elect honest and
sensible men to office; but if they haven’t the brains to do that they
won’t have the brains to do anything effective on the economic or any
other field. We know how hard it is to get people to think; but we
flatter ourselves that our propaganda is an educative force that grows
stronger every year, and has already achieved such power as to decide
the most important election held in this country since the Civil War.
“Already a large number of people have been educated--chiefly by our
propaganda--to understand, for example, the economic greed that lies
behind all wars. They perceive that so long as capital finds its highest
rate of profit in the home market, capitalists see to it that peace
remains secure; but that when capital has expanded to the point at which
the rate of interest begins to fall, or when labor has ceased to be
docile, because it has ceased to be unorganized and uninformed,
capitalists then seek foreign markets and foreign investments, and soon
require the help of war--that is, the lives of the workers at home--to
help them enforce their terms on foreign governments and peoples. Only
the national ownership of capital can change that. We thought once that
we were too civilized ever to go to war again; we begin to see that our
industrial feudalism leads inevitably to war and armaments, and the
intellectual stagnation that comes from a militaristic mode of national
life. We begin to see all history as a Dark Age (with fitful intervals
of light),--a long series of wars in which men have killed and died for
delusions, fighting to protect the property of their exploiters. And it
becomes a little clearer to us than before that this awful succession of
killings and robberies is no civilization at all, and that we shall
never have a civilization worthy of the name until we transform our
industrial war into the coöperative commonwealth, and all ‘foreigners’
into friends.”
3
_Eugenics_
“My dear young man,” says the Eugenist at this point, “you must study
biology. Your plan for the improvement of mankind is all shot through
with childish ignorance of nature’s way of doing things. Come into my
laboratory for a few years; and you will learn how little you can do by
merely changing the environment. It’s nature that counts, not nurture.
Improvement depends on the elimination of the inferior, not on their
reformation by Socialist leaflets or settlement work. What you have to
do is to find some substitute for that natural selection--the automatic
and ruthless killing off of the unfit--which we are more and more
frustrating with our short-sighted charity. Humanitarianism must get
informed. Our squeamishness about interfering with the holy ‘liberty of
the individual’ will have to be moderated by some sense of the right of
society to protect itself from interference by the individual. Here are
the feeble-minded, for example; they breed more rapidly than healthy
people do, and they almost always transmit their defect. If you don’t
interfere with these people, if you don’t teach them or force them to be
childless, you will have an increase in insanity along with the
development of humanity. Think of making a woman suffer to deliver into
the world a cripple or an idiot. And further, consider that the lowest
eighth of the people produce one-half of the next generation. The better
people, the more vigorous and healthy people, are refusing to have
children; every year the situation is becoming more critical. City-life
and factory-life make things still worse; young men coming from the
country plunge into the maelstrom of the city, then into its
femalestrom; they emerge with broken health, marry deformities dressed
up in the latest fashion, and produce children inferior in vigor and
ability to themselves. Given a hundred years more of this, and western
Europe and America will be in a condition to be overcome easily by the
fertile and vigorous races of the East. That is what you have to think
of. The problem is larger than that of making poor people less poor; it
is the problem of preserving our civilization. Your socialism will help,
but it will be the merest beginning; it will be but an introduction to
the socialization of selection,--which is eugenics. We will prevent
procreation by people who have a transmissible defect or disease; we
will require certificates of health and clean ancestry before permitting
marriage; we will encourage the mating, with or without love, of men and
women possessed of energy and good physique. We will teach people, in
Mr. Marett’s phrase, to marry less with their eyes and more with their
heads. It will take us a long while to put all this into effect; but we
will put it. Time is on our side; every year will make our case
stronger. Within half a century the educated world will come and beg us
to guide them in a eugenic revolution.”
4
_Anarchism_
A gentle anarchist:
“You do well to talk of revolution; but you do wrong to forget the
individual in the race. Your eugenic revolution will not stop the
exploitation of the workers by the manufacturers through the state. Give
men justice and they will soon be healthy; give them the decent life
which is the only just reward for their work, and you will not need
eugenics. Instead of bothering about parasitic germs you should attend
to parasitic exploiters; it is in this social parasitism that the real
danger of degeneration lies. Continued injustice of employers to
employees is splitting every western nation into factions; class-loyalty
will soon be stronger than loyalty to the community; and the time will
come when nations in which this civil war has not been superseded by
voluntary mutual aid will crumble into oblivion.
“And yet men are willing to be loyal to the community, if the community
is organized to give them justice. If exploitation were to cease there
would be such bonds of brotherhood among men as would make the community
practically everlasting. All you need do is to let men coöoperate in
freedom. They long to coöperate; all evolution shows a growth in the
ability to coöoperate; man surpassed the brute just because of this. Nor
is law or state needed; coercive government is necessary only in
societies founded on injustice. The state has always been an instrument
of exploitation; and law is merely the organized violence of the ruling
class. It is a subtle scheme; it enables industrial lords to do without
any pangs of conscience what but for their statute-books might give them
a qualm or two. Notice, for example, how perfectly Christian such
slaughters as those in Colorado or Virginia can be made to appear--even
to the slaughterers--by the delightful expedient of the statute-book.
They kill and call it law, so that they may sleep.
“And then we are told that one must never use violence in labor
disputes. But obviously it is precisely violence that is used against
labor, and against the free spirit. As a matter of history, rebels did
not begin to use violence on the authorities until the authorities had
used violence on them. We feel ourselves quite justified in using any
means of attack on a system so founded in coercion. The whole question
with us is one not of morals but of expediency. We have been moral a
little too long.”
5
_Individualism_
“Precisely,” says the Stirnerite anarchist; “it is all a question of
might, not of right; and we exploited ones may be as right as rectitude
and never get anywhere unless we can rhyme a little might to our right.
Each of us has a right to do whatever he is strong enough to do. ‘One
gets farther with a handful of might than with a bagful of right.’ He
who wants much, and knows how to get it, has in all times taken it, as
Napoleon did the continent, and the French Algeria. Therefore the only
point is that the respectful ‘lower classes’ should at length learn to
take for themselves what they want.”
6
_Individualism Again_
And lastly, _Advocatus Diaboli_, Mr. Status Quo:
“I agree with you right heartily, Sir Stirnerite anarchist; it is time
you children came to understand that everything is a question of power.
Let the fittest survive and let us all use whatever means we find
expedient. I am frank with you now; but you must not be surprised if
to-morrow I write out a few checks for the salaries of the liars whom I
have in my employ. Why should we tell the truth and go under? Surely you
will understand that not all knowledge is good for all men. If it gives
you satisfaction, for example, to spread information about
birth-control, you will not feel hurt if it gives us satisfaction to
oppose you, for the sake of the future armies of unemployed without
which our great scheme of industry would be seriously hampered.
“And I agree with your fellow-anarchist, that the state is often a
nuisance. I can make use of a little government; but when the state
begins to tell me how to run my business then I feel as if your
criticism of the state is very just--and convenient. I am an
individualist,--a good old American individualist,--like Jefferson and
Emerson. The state can’t manage industry half as well as we can. You
know--as our Socialists do not--that government ownership is only
ownership by politicians, by Hinky-Dinks and Bath-house Johns; and I can
tell you from intimate knowledge of these people that they will do
anything for money except efficient administrative work.
“Your scheme of having the workers take over the industries is a good
scheme--for the millennium. Where would you get men to direct you? They
come to us because we pay them well; if your syndicalist shops would pay
them as well as we do, they would be the beginning of a new aristocracy;
if you think these clever men will work for ‘honor’ you are leaning on
an airy dream. Destroy private property and you will have a nation of
hoboes and Hindus.
“As to exploitation, what would you have? We are strong, and you are
weak; it is the law of nature that we should use you, just as it is the
law of nature that one species should use the weaker species as its
prey. The weaker will always suffer, with or without law. Even if all
bellies are full, the majority will envy the intellectual power of their
betters, and will suffer just as keenly on the intellectual plane as
they do now on the physical. The alternative of the under-dog is to get
intelligence and power, or ‘stay put.’
“My advice, then, is to let things be. You can change the superficial
conditions of the struggle for existence and for power, but the
fundamental facts of it will remain. Monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy,--it’s all the same. The most powerful will rule, whether by
armies or by newspapers; it makes no difference if God is on the side of
the biggest battalions, or the side of the biggest type. We bought the
battalions; we buy the type.
“Come, let us get back to our business.”
III
Dissolutions
Here is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of our social _’isms_; and here is the
history of many a social rebel. From dissatisfaction to socialism, from
socialism to anarchism, from anarchism to Stirnerism, from Stirnerism
and the cult of the ego to Nietzsche and the right to exploit;--so has
many a man made the merry-go-round of thought and come back wearily at
last to the _terra firma_ of the thing that is. We sail into the sea of
social controversy without chart or compass or rudder; and though we
encounter much wind, we never make the port of our desire. We need maps,
and instruments, and knowledge; we need to make inquiries, to face our
doubts, to define our purposes; we shall have to examine more ruthlessly
our preconceptions and hidden premises, to force into the light the
wishes that secretly father our illegitimate thoughts. We must ask
ourselves questions that will reach down to the tenderest roots of our
philosophies.
You are a feminist, let us say. Very well. Have you ever considered the
sociological consequences of that very real disintegration of the “home”
which an advancing feminism implies? Granted that this disintegration
has been begun by the industrial revolution. Do you want it to go on
more rapidly? Do you want women to become more like men? Do you think
that the “new woman” will care to have children? It is surely better for
the present comfort of our society that there should be a considerable
fall in the birth rate; but will that expose the people of Europe and
America to absorption by the races of the East? You argue that the case
for feminism is as simple as the case for democracy; but is the case for
democracy simple? Is democracy competent? Is it bringing us where we
want to go? Or is it a sort of collective determination to drift with
the tide,--a sort of magnified _laissez-faire_? And as to “rights” and
“justice,” how do you answer Nietzsche’s contention that the more highly
organized species, sex, or class, must by its very nature use, command,
and exploit the less highly organized species, sex, or class?
You are a Socialist; and you yearn for a Utopia of friends and equals;
but will you, to make men equal, be compelled to chain the strength of
the strong with many laws and omnipresent force?--will you sacrifice the
superiority of the chosen few to the mediocrity of the many? Will you,
to control the exploiter, be obliged to control all men, even in
detail?--will your socialism really bring the slavery and servile state
that Spencer and Chesterton and Belloc fear? Is further centralization
of government desirable? Have you considered sufficiently the old
difficulty about the stimulus to endeavor in a society that should
restrict private property to a minimum and prohibit inheritance? Have
you arranged to protect your coöperative commonwealth by limiting
immigration--from Europe and from heaven?[295] Are you not, in general,
exaggerating the force of the aggregative as against the segregative
tendencies in human nature? And do you think that a change of laws can
make the weak elude the exploiting arm of the strong? Will not the
strongest men always make whatever laws are made, and rule wherever men
are ruled? Can any government stand that is not the expression of the
strongest forces in the community? And if the strongest force be
organized labor, are you sure that organized labor will not exploit and
tyrannize? Will the better organized and skilled workers be “just” to
the unskilled and imperfectly organized workers? And what do you mean by
“justice”?
And as to the eugenist, surely it is unnecessary to expose his
unpreparedness to meet the questions which his programme raises.
Questions, for example, as to what “units” of character to breed for, if
there are such “units”; whether definite breeding for certain results
would forfeit adaptive plasticity; whether compulsory sterilization is
warranted by our knowledge of heredity; whether serious disease is not
often associated with genius; whether the native mental endowments of
rich and poor are appreciably different, and whether the “comparative
infertility of the upper classes” is really making for the deterioration
of the race; whether progress depends on racial changes so much as on
changes in social institutions and traditions. And so on.
And the anarchist, whom one loves if only for the fervor of his hope and
the beauty of his dream,--the anarchist falters miserably in the face of
interrogation. If all laws were to be suspended to-morrow, all coercion
of citizen by state, how long would it be before new laws would arise?
Would the aforementioned strong cease to be strong and the weak cease to
be weak? Would people be willing to forego private property? Are not
belief and disbelief in private property determined less by logic and
“justice” than by one’s own success or failure in the acquisition of
private property? Do only the weak and uncontrolled advocate absolute
lack of restraint? Do most men want liberty so much that they will
tolerate chaos and a devil-take-the-hind-most individualism for the sake
of it? Can it be, after all, that freedom is a negative thing,--that
what men want is, for some, achievement, for others, peace,--and that
for these they will give even freedom? What if a great number of people
dread liberty, and are not at all so sensitive to restraint and
commandment as the anarchist? Perhaps only children and geniuses can be
truly anarchistic? Perhaps freedom itself is a problem and not a
solution? Does the mechanization, through law and custom, of certain
elements in our social behavior, like the mechanization, through habit
and instinct, of certain elements in individual behavior, result in
greater freedom for the higher powers and functions? Again, to have
freedom for all, all must be equal; but does not development make for
differentiation and inequality? Consider the America of three hundred
years ago; a nation of adventurous settlers, hardly any of them better
off than any other,--all of a class, all on a level; and see what
inequalities and castes a few generations have produced! Is there a
necessary antithesis between liberty and order, freedom and control?--or
are order and control the first condition of freedom? Does not law serve
many splendid purposes,--could it not serve more? Is the state necessary
so long as there are long-eared and long-fingered gentry?
As for your revolutions, who profits by them? The people who have
suffered, or the people who have thought? Is a revolution, so far as the
poor are concerned, merely the dethronement of one set of rulers or
exploiters so that another set may have a turn? Do not most
revolutions, like that which wished to storm heaven by a tower, end in
a confusion of tongues? And after each outbreak do not the workers
readapt themselves to their new slavery with that ease and torpid
patience which are the despair of every leader, until they are awakened
by another quarrel among their masters?
* * * * *
One could fling about such questions almost endlessly, till every _’ism_
should disappear under interrogation points. Every such _’ism_, clearly,
is but a half-truth, an arrested development, suffering from
malinformation. One is reminded of the experiment in which a
psychologist gave a ring-puzzle to a monkey, and--in another room--a
like puzzle to a university professor: the monkey fell upon the puzzle
at once with teeth and feet and every manner of hasty and haphazard
reaction,--until at last the puzzle, dropped upon the floor, came apart
by chance; the professor sat silent and motionless before the puzzle,
working out in thought the issue of many suggested solutions, and
finally, after forty minutes, touched it to undo it at a stroke. Our
_’isms_ are simian reactions to the social puzzle. We jump at
conclusions, we are impinged upon extremes, we bound from opposite to
opposite, we move with blinders to a passion-colored goal. Some of us
are idealists, and see only the beautiful desire; some of us are
realists, and see only the dun and dreary fact; hardly any of us can
look fact in the face and see through it to that which it might be. We
“bandy half-truths” for a decade and then relapse into the peaceful
insignificance of conformity.[296]
It dawns on students of social problems, as it dawned long since on
philosophers, that the beginning of their wisdom is a confession of
their ignorance. We know now that the thing we need, and for lack of
which we blunder valiantly into futility, is not good intentions but
informed intelligence. All problems are problems of education; all the
more so in a democracy. Not because education can change the original
nature of man, but because intelligent coöperation can control the
stimuli which determine the injuriousness or beneficence of original
dispositions. Impulse is not the enemy of intelligence; it is its raw
material. We desire knowledge--and particularly knowledge of
ourselves--so that we may know what external conditions evoke
destructive, and what conditions evoke constructive, responses. We do
not, for example, expect intelligence to eradicate pugnacity; we do not
want it to do so; but we want to eradicate the environmental conditions
which turn this impulse to wholesale suicide. Men should fight; it is
the essence of their value that they are willing to fight; the problem
of intelligence is to discuss and to create means for the diversion of
pugnacity to socially helpful ends. Character is _per se_ neither good
nor bad, but becomes one or the other according to the nature of the
stimuli presented. What we call moral reform, then, waits on information
and consequent remoulding of the factors determining the direction of
our original dispositions. We become “better” men and women only so far
as we become more intelligent. Just as psychoanalysis can, in some
measure, reconstruct the personal life, so social analysis can
reconstruct social life and turn into productive channels the innocent
but too often destructive forces of original nature.[297]
Our problem, then, to repeat once more our central theme, is to
facilitate the growth and spread of intelligence. With this definition
of the issue we come closer to our thesis,--that the social problem must
be approached through philosophy, and philosophy through the social
problem.
CHAPTER II
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY
I
Epistemologs
Now there are a great many people who will feel no thrill at all at the
mention of philosophy,--who will rather consider themselves excused by
the very occurrence of the word from continuing on the road which this
discussion proposes to travel. No man dares to talk of philosophy in
these busy days except after an apologetic preface; philosophers
themselves have come to feel that their thinking is so remote from
practical endeavor that they have for the most part abandoned the effort
to relate their work to the concrete issues of life. In the eyes of the
man who does things philosophy is but an aërial voyaging among the mists
of transcendental dialectic, or an ineffective moralizing substitute for
supernatural religion. Philosophy was once mistress of all the
disciplines of thought and search; now none so poor to do her reverence.
There is no way of meeting this indictment other than to concede it. It
is true. It is mild. Only a lover of philosophy can know--with the
intimacy of a _particeps criminis_--how deeply philosophy has fallen
from her ancient heights. Looking back to Greece we find that philosophy
there was a real pursuit of wisdom, a very earnest effort to arrive by
discussion and self-criticism at a way of life, a _philosophia vitæ
magistra_, a knowledge of the individual and social good and of the
means thereto, a conscious direction of social institutions to ethical
ends; philosophy and life in those days were bound up with one another
as mechanics is now bound up with efficient construction. Even in the
Middle Ages philosophy meant coördinate living, synthetic behavior; with
all their reputation for cobweb-spinning, the Scholastics were much
closer to life in their thinking than most modern philosophers have been
in theirs.
The lapse of philosophy from her former significance and vitality is the
result of the exaggerated emphasis placed on the epistemological problem
by modern thinkers; and this in turn is in great part due to the
difficulties on which Descartes stumbled in his effort to reconcile his
belief in mechanism with his desire to placate the Jesuits. How minor a
rôle is played by the problems of the relation between subject and
object, the validity of knowledge, epistemological realism and idealism,
in a frankly mechanist philosophy, appears in Bacon, Hobbes, and
Spinoza;[298] these men--deducting Bacon’s astute obeisance to
theology--know what they want and say what they mean; they presume, with
a maturity so natural as to be mistaken for _naïveté_, that the validity
of thought is a matter to be decided by action rather than by theory;
they take it for granted that the supreme and ultimate purpose of
philosophy is not analysis but synthesis, not the intellectual
categorizing of experience but the intelligent reconstruction of life.
Indeed, as one pursues this clew through the devious--almost
stealthy--course of modern speculation it appears that no small part of
the epistemological development has been made up of the oscillations,
compromises, and obscurities natural in men who were the exponents and
the victims of a painful transition. Civilization was passing from one
intellectual basis to another; and in these weird epistemologs the vast
process came uncomfortably to semiconsciousness. They were old bottles
bursting with new wine; and their tragedy was that they knew it. They
clung to the old world even while the new one was swimming perilously
into their ken; they found a pitiful solace in the old phrases, the old
paraphernalia of a dead philosophy; and in the suffering of their
readjustment there was, quite inevitably, some measure of
self-deception.
And that is why they are so hard to understand. Even so subtle a
thinker as Santayana finds them too difficult, and abandons them in
righteous indignation. There is no worse confounding of confusion than
self-deception: let a man be honest with himself, and he may lie with
tolerable intelligibility and success; but let him be his own dupe and
he may write a thousand critiques and never get himself understood.
Indeed, some of them do not want to be understood, they only want to be
believed. Hegel, for example, was not at all surprised to find that no
one understood him; he would have been surprised and chagrined to find
that some one had. Obscurity can cover a multitude of sins.
Add to this self-befoggery the appalling _historismus_ (as Eucken calls
it), the strange lifeless interest in the past for its own sake, the
petty poring over problems of text and minutiæ of theory in the classics
of speculation;--and the indictment of philosophy as a useless appanage
of the idle rich gains further ground. We do not seem to understand how
much of the past is dead, how much of it is but a drag on the
imaginative courage that dares to think of a future different from the
past, and better. Philosophy is too much a study of the details of
superseded systems; it is too little the study of the miraculous living
moment in which the past melts into the present and the future finds
creation. Most people have an invincible habit of turning their backs to
the future; they like the past because the future is an adventure. So
with most philosophers to-day; they like to write analyses of Kant,
commentaries on Berkeley, discussions of Plato’s myths; they are
students remembering, they have not yet become men thinking. They do not
know that the work of philosophy is in the street as well as in the
library, they do not feel and understand that the final problem of
philosophy is not the relation of subject and object but the misery of
men.
And so it is well that philosophy, such as it chiefly is in these days,
should be scorned as a busy idler in a world where so much work is
asking to be done.
Philosophy was vital in Plato’s day; so vital that some philosophers
were exiled and others put to death. No one would think of putting a
philosopher to death to-day. Not because men are more delicate about
killing; but because there is no need to kill that which is already
dead.[299]
II
Philosophy as Control
But after all, this is not a subject for rhetoric so much as for
resolution. Here we are again in our splendid library; here we sit,
financially secure, released from the material necessities of life, to
stand apart and study, to report and help and state and solve; under us
those millions holding us aloft so that we may see for them, dying by
the thousand so that we may find the truth that will make the others
free; and what do we do? We make phrases like “_esse est percipi_,”
“synthetic judgments _à priori_,” and “being is nothing”; we fill the
philosophic world with great Saharas of Kantiana; we write epistemology
for two hundred years. Surely there is but one decent thing for us to
do: either philosophy is of vital use to the community, or it is not. If
it is not, we will abandon it; if it is, then we must seek that vital
use and show it. We have been privileged to study and think and travel
and learn the world; and now we stand gaping before it as if there were
nothing wrong, as if nothing could be done, as if nothing should be
done. We are expert eyes, asked to point the way; and all that we report
is that there is nothing to see, and nowhere to go. We are without even
a partial sense of the awful responsibility of intelligence.
It is time we put this problem of knowledge, even the problem of the
validity of knowledge, into the hands of science. How we come to know,
what the process of knowledge is, what “truth” is,--all these are
questions of fact; they are problems for the science of psychology,
they are not problems for philosophy. This continual sharpening of the
knife, as Lotze put it, becomes tiresome--almost pathetic--if, after
all, there is no cutting done. Like Faust, who found himself when,
blinded by the sun, he turned his face to the earth, so we shall have to
forget our epistemological heaven and remember mother earth; we shall
have to give up our delightful German puzzles and play our living part
in the flow of social purpose. Philosophers must once more learn to
live.