to the soft mood of modern sentiment. With Schopenhauer, the very
embodiment of modernity, we have seen pity once more set on high as the
unselfish virtue. It is the self-less man that becomes the holy man;
it is the holy man that becomes the sage, denying the world with its
pitiless Will-to-live.
Now it is against this very philosophy of Schopenhauer, against this
conception of the beauty and wisdom of self-surrender that Nietzsche
reacts. If to Spinoza pity is a folly, if to Kant it is a superfluity,
to Nietzsche it is a vice--more than a vice, a disease, that deep
sickness of modernity which spells decadence. Schopenhauer, and all
that older wisdom which Schopenhauer loved, of Jesus and of Buddha,
these were Nietzsche’s great denials, these were the false physicians
of the soul that had made the soul sick in making it sad.
If Nietzsche reacts so violently against the teaching of Schopenhauer,
it is not because he is by nature precluded from appreciating its
seduction. It is rather because he had at one time in his life too
deeply understood and too completely yielded to its soothing counsel of
surrender that he later bends all his energies to its destruction. This
complete revulsion of feeling was not a unique episode in Nietzsche’s
experience. On the contrary his intellectual life is largely a history
of such accepting and rejecting. Born into a clergyman’s family,
passing his childhood in quiet Naumburg, Nietzsche in his last years
claims the name of Antichrist. Eagerly connecting himself in his
student days at Bonn with one of those corps that treasured the
republican ideals of ’48, he advocates in his later years a social
organization modeled on the caste-system of the East. An ardent patriot
in ’70, he becomes the contemner of the organized state in general, a
contemptuous critic of Germanism in particular. A trained student of
history, a distinguished professor of philology at Basel, some of his
most cunning and cutting analyses expose the weakness of the learned
temperament. In his first important work, “The Birth of Tragedy,” we
find him an apostle of Wagner; his later “Case of Wagner” is perhaps
the cruelest polemic against a man and his art of which modern letters
give example.
The bare enumeration of these changes is bound to leave an impression
of waywardness. Yet this impression would be in so far false that it
is clear each accepting was a matter of deep feeling with Nietzsche,
each rejecting cost its price. At times, to be sure, he would put on
a brave front before the spectacle of his thought’s inconstancy. Only
those that can change can grow: “I love those that change,” he writes.
But at other times there is more of melancholy in his recalling of
abandoned ideals. “If thinking be thy destiny, then honor that destiny
with divine honors; sacrifice to it thy best and thy dearest.” It
is not without reason that he calls the progress of his thoughts a
“Selbstüberwindung” and one may best understand the fierce bitterness
of his attack upon those he has put behind him if one remember that
nothing less than hatred could replace an old love in this too
tenacious heart.
It is then of a piece with the rest, if a philosophy which in the end
represented the dearest foe of his thought should have been the friend
and guide of Nietzsche’s youth. How deep a meaning Schopenhauer had
once possessed for him may be judged from the following extracts. The
first is from a letter written in 1867 to his friend the Baron von
Gersdorff on the occasion of the death of von Gersdorff’s brother:
“Perhaps this death is the greatest grief that could have come to you.
And now, dear friend, you have experienced for yourself--I gather from
the tenor of your letter--why our Schopenhauer esteems pain and trouble
a great gift of fate, the δεύτερος πλοῦς to the resigning of the will.
You too have felt and lived through the enlightening, deeply quieting
and settling power of pain. It is a time in which you can yourself try
out the teaching of Schopenhauer. If the fourth book of his masterpiece
now make on you an ugly disturbing downweighing impression, if it have
not the power to uplift you, to carry you through outer violent grief
to that chastened yet serene mood that comes over us as we listen to
noble music, to that mood in which one feels the earthy shell to have
dropped from one,--then I too will have no more of this philosophy.
Only the deeply suffering can and may speak the final word on such
matters. The rest of us standing in the current of things, only
longing for that denial of the will as for the blessed isles, can not
judge whether the solace of such philosophy is adequate to times of
deep sorrow.”[12]
And some three years later, Nietzsche invalided home from the hospital
corps of the Prussian army writes to this same friend at the front:
“This morning brought me the happiest surprise and a relief from much
inquietude and anxiety--your letter.... Everything that you write
affects me deeply, above all the sincere earnest tone with which you
speak of this test by fire of our common philosophy of life. I too have
been through a like experience, for me too these months have proved a
time in which my beliefs have shown themselves deep-rooted. One can die
with them; that means much more than saying, one can live by them.”[13]
One may die by the light of Schopenhauerian principles! To die by
them--the taunt comes from an older Nietzsche--is all that one can
do with them. But by this later time, dying, voluntary dying, dying
with the breath still left in the body--all this has lost its charm
for Nietzsche. He is now all for living; for more than living, for
fighting; for conquering; for, if need be, killing.
“One who like me,” he writes in these later days, “has long busied
himself with curious interest in thinking out pessimism to its bitter
end ... has probably in this very pursuit--without precisely having
willed it--turned his eyes toward the opposite ideal: toward the ideal
of the most domineering, the most living, the most aggressive of men,
toward him who has not merely reconciled and adjusted himself to things
as they are and have been; but who wants more of them, just as they are
and have been--more in all eternity, crying insatiably _da capo_ not to
his own life only, but to the whole scene and all the play.”
The passage is not without a hint of Nietzsche’s personal psychology.
No doubt he loved contrast for the sake of contrast; no doubt he
loved drama--particularly the dramatic conflict of ideas--for the
play’s sake; no doubt he loved paradox not a little for its noise. Yet
it is not hard for the student to make out motives deeper than the
personal, and more general, that impelled Nietzsche to turn his eyes
from the ethics of self-sacrifice to the opposite ideal, to the ideal
of “the most living, the most aggressive of men,” to the ideal of the
“Caesarian Conqueror.”
* * * * *
No understanding of these motives can leave out of account the great
scientific idea that had made its appearance in the nineteenth
century--the idea of organic evolution. It is difficult to overestimate
the suggestion that would lie in such an idea for one imbued with the
thought of Schopenhauer. In its Darwinian form, the essential mechanism
of evolution is seen to be a struggle, a war between race and race,
between individual and individual. That such warfare is the necessary
expression of the will to live, the most universal principle of that
troubled phenomenon we call nature, Schopenhauer had indeed grasped,
had insisted upon, had made the cornerstone of his theory of life. But
then Schopenhauer had dwelt with equal insistence on the uselessness,
the irrationality of the struggle. It was all cruel, then, nowhere
benign, because nowhere directed toward an end. But now a purpose in
the struggle is just what the evolutionary hypothesis seems to suggest.
What if life’s pitiless cruelty were justified as the indispensable
means to a supreme end--the end namely of producing a being higher than
any of those that take part in it? By the selection of the fittest,
would not this warfare result in the production of the superior? And
if the superior could be produced only at the cost of the inferior, is
there not in this sacrifice something more than wanton and irrational
cruelty?
It is little wonder that one already impressed with the
“self-contradiction” involved in a will not to live should seize upon
this suggestion. “I bring you a goal,” cries Zarathustra. And this goal
he calls the “Uebermensch.”
“I preach to you the Superman. Man is something to be overcome. What
have you done to overcome him?
“All things before you have produced something beyond themselves, and
would you be the ebb of this great flood? Would you rather go back to
the animal than overcome man?
“What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall
man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame.
“You have traveled the way from worm to man, and much in you is still
worm....
“Lo, I preach to you the Superman.
“The Superman is the meaning of the earth.”
* * * * *
To produce the higher race! that is “the meaning of the earth,” the
meaning that Schopenhauer had missed, that only one coming after Darwin
could have seized; a meaning that does not mask the cruelty of life,
yet takes from it its tragedy--the tragedy of senseless casual pain.
But now that we have found the goal, we may also define the worth of
life and its duties. In deducing these we meet the most astonishing
“Umwerthung aller Werthe,” the complete inversion of those notions of
worth which we dwellers in Christendom have inherited. “I sit,” says
Zarathustra, “with old shattered tables of the law around me--and
with new tables, too, half made out.” We approach an understanding of
Nietzsche’s meaning when he wrote that God and man dies of pity. For
if with him we make whatever promotes progress toward the superman
our good, whatever retards it our evil, then must it not be that a
pity which spares the weak for pity’s sake is the very vice, the moral
disease, which makes for decadence? Is not pity the anodyne of those
who despair of life, and is not hope in the future necessarily cruel?
Before we who are of necessity touched with modernity react against a
doctrine so little in accord with our profession of self-sacrifice,
it would be well to ask ourselves how seriously we take this our
profession. Is the quality of mercy indeed never strained for us?
For example, are we citizens of a young and prosperous country eager
to throw open its doors to the unhappy dregs of outworn lands and
exhausted civilizations? For this would be the charitable thing to do.
How many are prepared to encourage the mentally unsound or physically
diseased to propagate? Yet pity must deny itself something if it would
condemn misfortune to wed loneliness.
To be sure one expects at this point to hear of “the deeper pity”; to
be told that such deeper pity must let some perish in their misery
that more may not be made wretched. Even so, we have passed from the
doctrine of the supremacy of charity to the theory of “the greatest
happiness to the greatest number.” Already we must occasionally cry
with Nietzsche, “Be hard!” and must at moments understand his phrase,
“The will not-to-help may be higher than the sympathy that springs to
aid.”
And we might carry our criticism of sympathy a step further. What
sanction has the formula “the greatest happiness to the greatest
number”? Obviously, the sanction of the approval of the greatest
number; it is the complete expression of the egoism of the mob. But
egoism for egoism, is there anything to recommend the ideal of the
mob as against that of the exceptional being? Surely, if we make
progress our guide, those who have done the most to bring about modern
conditions are just those whom the mob has condemned and suppressed as
working against its welfare. Socrates was poisoned, Jesus crucified,
Caesar assassinated, Bruno burned, Napoleon isolated, for their crimes.
It makes little difference whether the crime was against the state,
the priestly tradition, the republic, the church, the nations; the
power to punish in each case came from the masses. Each of these
conquerors was and had to be a pitiless egoist, hesitating not at all
to overturn the world of his day for the sake of his own ideal. Looking
back on these historic figures, one is tempted to say that the glory of
the world abides in its criminals, those lonely men, those egoists.
If I have included the gentle figure of Jesus in a list of the
conquerors, it is not because Nietzsche would regard him as one who had
made for the world’s progress, however much he may have contributed
to its history. Nietzsche would, however, include the founder of the
gospel of love among the master egoists. Of course, modernity will cry
paradox! “Granted,” it will say, “granted he brought a sword into the
world, was it not an enormous pity for the humanity that was to be that
moved him to destroy the world that was, and with it, himself?”
Nietzsche’s handling of this paradox is one of the significant
movements of his thought. To understand it we must go back a little.
It is not the question of the personality of Jesus, of the motives
that were clearly present to his own consciousness that Nietzsche
would discuss. In general, he is completely indifferent to the kind of
evidence furnished by self-analysis respecting the motives of conduct
and the ground of opinion. Even those whose powers of analysis might
be supposed to give them a right to speak--the great philosophers
and lovers of truth--are to Nietzsche deceivers or self-deceived.
“What tempts me to look upon all philosophers half with mistrust,
half with amusement is not that one discovers again and again what
innocents they are, how often and how easily mistaken and misled,
not, in a word, their prattle and childishness. It is rather that, in
spite of the great and virtuous noise made by the whole company the
moment the question of truth is even remotely touched on, they do not
deal ingenuously with us. They all pose as believing that they have
arrived at their own opinions by the self-development of a cool pure
and divinely impassible dialectic (in contrast with the mystics of all
shades, who, honest fools, _will_ speak of Inspiration). At bottom,
however, it is some idea loved at first sight, most frequently some
heart’s desire made abstract and well refined that they defend with
reasons found for the purpose. Advocates denying the name, cunning
special pleaders for their prejudices, they christen these _The Truth_.”
If then the lover of truth cannot tell the truth about himself, if the
cool thinker is unable to reveal the grounds of his thought, how much
less can the man of heart tell what is at the bottom of his heart, the
man of passion tell where his deepest passion lies? It remains for
Nietzsche to make good these short-comings.
And Nietzsche makes them good in a way that lacks neither simplicity
nor decision. He lays it down that there is one motive to which all
others reduce, and to which everything that lives instinctively reacts.
This motive is not the mere desire to preserve oneself, the desire
that many have supposed sufficient to explain even the phenomenon of
evolution. It goes beyond self-defense to strive after the maximum
of aggression. Nietzsche calls it “der Wille zur Macht”--the Lust of
Power. It is this that makes the world dance, that makes the brute
prepare the way for man, that drives man to produce the superman. It is
consequently this that compels the thinker to his thought, the meek to
his resignation, the crucified to his cross.
“I am not of those of whom one asks ‘why?’” Nietzsche has once written.
If you cannot accept his assurance that the deepest spring of conduct
is the will to conquer, then accept the contrary doctrine: Nietzsche
is prepared to trust his insight that you do this because the contrary
doctrine is just the one _you_ need to work out your own scheme of
conquest,--as a wolf may on occasion sincerely prefer the pelt of a
lamb to his own natural coat.
It is to the lust of power in men’s hearts that the gospel of the
crucified one appeals! The paradox is perhaps most completely worked
out in Nietzsche’s “Genealogie der Moral.” Here history is made to
reveal a long conflict between two contradictory estimates of worth.
For the one standard a contrast exists between high morals and low;
for the other, between holiness and sin. The code of ethics based on
the first of these contrasts embodies, as the etymology of its terms
indicates, the aristocratic conception of worth. “High morals” are
simply the manners of the upper, the ruling class; “low morals,” the
habits of the underlings. This standard of valuation is accepted by
the high and low alike of a race in its youth and strength. The second
standard defining the opposition between good and evil is an invention
of the miserable and oppressed; it is their reaction against their
conquerors, the expression of their resentment. It can only become
dominant in decadent races; its triumph in Christianity is evidence
that the modern world has sunk to the ideals of the lowly--that is to
say, of the low.
If we place these two codes side by side, we realize how completely
the acceptance of either demands the “Umwerthung aller Werthe”
acknowledged by the other. The highest worth in the aristocratic
morality is the pride of strength; the great wickedness to the lowly
moralist is just this same pride of strength. The great virtue of the
slave-morality is humility; to the aristocratic taste this humility is
abject. Of the history of the warfare between the two, Nietzsche gives
a sufficiently dramatic account. Characteristic is his picture of the
triumph of the slaves:
“All that has been accomplished on the earth against the higher orders
is as nothing compared with what the Jews have done: the Jews, that
priest-led people that finally contrived to have satisfaction of its
enemies by a complete upsetting of all their ethical standards, in
other words, by an act of intellectual revenge. It was the Jews who
with inexorable logic dared to deny the aristocratic equation (good =
lofty = powerful = beautiful = fortunate = god-favored) and who with
bottomless hatred--the hatred born of impotence--set their teeth in a
formula: to wit, ‘only the wretched are the good; only the poor, the
weak, the lowly are the good; the suffering, the sick, the unlovely are
indeed the only servants of God and the only ones blessed of God--while
you, O ye high and mighty, you are in all eternity the men of sin, of
violence, of lust, the insatiable, the Godless, and you shall be in
all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, the damned!’... With the
Jews begins the slave-morality, that morality which has a struggle of
two thousand years behind it, one which we fail to note to-day, just
because--it is victorious.”
The master is made to accept the slave-morality, the tyrant is
made afraid! Our English poet Browning has given a picture of this
moment in history which surpasses even Nietzsche’s in vividness. The
man-forsaken, cowering yonder in his selfless humility--tempts the
tyrant to wring from him one gesture of rebellion, one word that
suggests pride of self. In vain! The slave’s arm of defense is just
non-resistance, just a mimicry of non-entity.
When sudden ... how think ye the end?
Did I say “without friend”?
Say rather, from marge to blue marge
The whole sky grew his targe
With the sun’s self for visible boss,
While an Arm ran across
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast
Where the wretch was safe prest!
Do you see? Just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God’s skirts, and prayed!
--So, _I_ was afraid!
But the psychology of this fear of the Lord that is the beginning of
decadence? How is the tyrant to be made to accept the “Sklavenmoral,”
to respect, even to imitate humility and to call it holy? Well, the
slave has on his side two things that make for success: superior
numbers and superior cunning. For “only those who have need of
cunning,” Nietzsche writes, “acquire it.” And the strong has one
vulnerable point--his superstition. It is this point that the instinct
of slave-hatred has found; with cunning and with numbers it has managed
to inculcate a belief in the God of Pity, to overthrow the aristocratic
appreciation of high and low, to substitute for it a morality of the
miserable that sets up the distinction between holiness and sin. It is
the denial of the will to conquer implied by such a standard of conduct
that makes modernity decadent, that unfits it to produce the superman.
No wonder Nietzsche should have claimed the gratitude of higher men for
his glad tidings, the God of Pity is dead!
* * * * *
In passing beyond the morality of decadence, every suggestion of a plan
of life that might be substituted for it, must come from the past: the
young races not yet fallen into decrepitude give us our models of the
heroic. We cannot however turn the clock back, we cannot repeat their
acts today without becoming such anachronisms as a Cervantes could make
laughter of. It may be however that our own institutions, foremost of
which is the well-organized state, leave ample room for the heroism
that prepares the way for the superman.
“Where the state ends--there begins the man who is not superfluous....
“Where the state ends--Look, my brothers! Do you not see the rainbow
and the bridges that lead to the Superman?”
Where the state ends! only there does Nietzsche’s interest begin. But
would he have the state end much nearer its beginning; yes, before
its beginning; would he return to the condition that has no social,
no political organization? Perhaps--it is hard to say; but it is not
necessary that one advocate anarchy in order that one should prepare a
field for that great struggle of man against man out of which are to
emerge the victors, the fathers of the superman.
Huxley suggests another solution. For him too where the state ends
a new struggle begins. The state assures security of life, and of
this security is born a new desire--the _aviditas vitae_, let us say
the desire for the maximum of life measured in terms of power and
enjoyment. With this struggle born of the _aviditas vitae_, begins
Nietzsche’s theory of ethical values. Here indeed there can be no
question of unselfishness, of self-sacrifice for another. Within this
domain the meaning of good and bad stands out with perfect clearness.
“What is good?” Nietzsche asks. “All that heightens in man the feeling
of power, the desire for power, power itself.
“What is bad? All that comes from weakness.
“What is happiness? The feeling that our strength grows, that an
obstacle is overcome.
“Not contentment, but more power; not universal peace, but war; not
virtue, but forcefulness.
“The weak and ineffective must go under; first principle of _our_ love
of humanity. And one should even lend one’s hand to this end.
“What is more harmful than any vice? Pity for the condition of the
ineffectives and weak--Christianity.”
Yet one must not imagine that this pitiless struggle of which is to be
born the man of tomorrow is gloomy and hate-inspired. On the contrary
it is joyous, and gives scope for a much nobler love than that which
is pitiful. I know of no institution of modern life that so nearly
realizes Nietzsche’s idea of this struggle together with the virtues
it engenders, as does that of sport among gentlemen. Here one plays
to win, and to spare one’s opponent or to be spared by him merely mars
sport. Yet one does not hate one’s opponent, but loves him for his good
sportsmanship. Only, this love, this friendship among strong men must
not weaken the arm, must not soften the will; if it do, it destroys
itself and is returned with contempt. We do not hate men because we
fear them, Nietzsche makes it out, but just because we do not fear
them. The hatred that leads one to shun one’s kind is born of disdain.
Life that has for its joy the joy of battle, for its reward the sense
of strength that grows with its exercise, for its delight the love of
brother warriors, a brother that can give and take death generously! It
is only the many too many, weakly looking on and trembling before the
spectacle of a strength they fear and hate, that have no joy of life
and cry, “Let there be peace.”
* * * * *