I
_The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic_! Nietzsche was well advised to
append the word "polemic" to his title, for it supplies the key to
his whole position. To some extent, no doubt, the "Genealogy" may be
the expression in more philosophic language of those ideas, which
find in Zarathustra their poetic and almost biblical formulation. Yet
philosopher though he may be, Nietzsche is no abstract thinker sitting
down stolidly on some icy height to solve the riddle of the universe,
whatever it may be, by the rigid rules of abstract logic, so that he
may placidly present the solution to such members of the public as
happen to be interested in metaphysics. On the contrary his mind, and
even more truly his temperament, are made up from the outset. Certain
ideas grip him so tensely, and for him, at any rate, constitute so
fiery and omnipresent a reality, as to be from his standpoint things
transcending the mere cavillings of logicians and scientists.
"You ask me why," says Zarathustra, "but I say unto you I am not one of
those whom one may ask their why."
The same idea is more technically expressed in the preface to the
Genealogy--"that new immoral, or at least, 'amoral' _a priori_, and
that 'categorical imperative,' which was its voice (but, oh I how
hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems), to
which since then I have given more and more obedience (and, indeed,
what is more than obedience)." For, startling though it may seem to
the orthodox, albeit acceptable enough to the acolytes of the new
faith, the fact stands out irresistibly, that all the later writings of
Nietzsche are saturated through and through with the religious spirit.
For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the
infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief
in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed
the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have
given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to
Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. The
content, indeed, of the religion of this converse Christ may be
diametrically opposed to that of the original, but the machinery is the
same. With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom
of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it
may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of
a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement
to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little
extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit
as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma
of self-expression and self-glorification. Turn, in fact, the doctrines
of Christianity upside down, but leave constant the missionary
enthusiasm of its founder, his chronic fits of extreme depression and
extreme exaltation, and you have the quintessence of Nietzsche.
As, however, it is the boast of all religions that they are beyond the
realms of exact logic and empirical science, it would be as unfair
to look in our prophet's polemic for the mathematical accuracy of a
Euclidian proposition, as it would be to search for such accuracy amid
the many grandiose and tragic thoughts that loom over the invectives of
Isaiah, Jesus, and Jeremiah.
Not, indeed, but what there are many new, swift, and illuminating
truths in our philosopher's gospel, just as there were in the
pronouncements of his afore-said Hebrew brethren. But the essence, the
_raison d'être_ of the whole book is purely polemical. Nietzsche is out
to kill, and so long as his weapons effectually subserve that object,
he is, and quite logically, indifferent to aught else.
Before, however, we analyse in detail the philosophy of this book, it
is advisable to adjust our sights to those particular targets on which
Nietzsche trained his gigantic and murderous artillery. We shall also
have a better prospect of getting really into touch with "the very
inner pulse of the machine," the real core of this philosophy, if we
take a necessarily short, but it is to be hoped none the less vivid,
glance at those reasons which induced Nietzsche to envisage the objects
of his attack with so tense and implacable a hatred.
Now Nietzsche found his intellectual jumping-off ground in that
hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism stuck on a pedestal of sex, which
constituted the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the essence of the
fashionable pessimism of mid-century Germany. To endeavour to condense
one of the most brilliant and elaborate systems of the last century
into a few words is at best a delicate and hazardous task, yet perhaps
we may adumbrate tentatively the radical elements which spurred
Nietzsche to so sanguinary a revolt.
Life according to Schopenhauer was a sorry failure, a thing not worth
living on its merits, but kept going by the driving impetus of a blind
life-force and knit with a mutual pity. Life then being intrinsically
evil, the remedy for the evil was to live as little as possible--"Draw
your desire back from the world so that there may be an end of that
phenomenal life which is nothing but grief." Apart from general
asceticism, there were two specific anodynes prescribed by Schopenhauer
for the disease called life--art which transcended life, and lifted
the spectator or listener on to another plane, and philosophy which,
as it were, blunted the sting of life by the contemplation of the
essentially unreal nature of the phenomenal universe. But the greatest
good was Nirvana, a kind of Pantheistic Absolute of negativity, into
which one eventually merged, to enjoy the supreme paradox of a peaceful
self-consciousness of one's own nothingness.
It is easy for us to sneer, nowadays, at this bilious and suicidal
system, and to explain the whole theory of the Will to Live by the
keen and chronic tyranny which the sexual instinct exercised over
the philosopher himself; the fact remained, Schopenhauer was the
dominant influence of the day--how dominant, can be seen from the
fact that the whole of later Wagnerian music is merely a translation
of his philosophy into the language of sound. It is easy to see the
extent to which Schopenhauer and Wagner were saturated with the whole
spirit of primitive and mediæval Christianity. Human life, forsooth,
is essentially bad and essentially unreal; salvation only lies in
the mortification and annihilation of the self. Apart, however,
from philosophical and theological technicalities, the profound
psychological import of this nihilistic pessimism and neo-Christian
romanticism is patent. Man looks at man's life on earth, and gives it
up as a bad job, or at best makes some fantastic effort to create a
new world to redress the balance of the old. "They wanted to run away
from their misery, and the stars were too far away. Then they sighed,
Oh, that there were heavenly ways, forsooth, to slink into another
Being and Happiness."
It has, in fact, been well put that, as the motto of Goethe was
"_Memento vivere_," so was the motto of Schopenhauer, "_Memento mori_."
Now, Nietzsche voiced the revolt of those temperaments whose ears
were attuned rather to "_Memento vivere_" than "_Memento mori_." We
must remember, moreover, that that Christian romanticism which finds
its best metaphysical formulation in Schopenhauer was in itself but
a reaction from the real spirit of the century, that ebullience and
exuberance of the human ego of which Stendhal is perhaps the most
typical manifestation. It might well indeed be instructive to trace the
intellectual descent of Nietzsche from Stendhal, and, applying again
the sociological method, to speculate as to how far he derived some of
the impetus for his philosophy of egoism from the aggressive wars of
Prussia, as exemplified in the Sadowa campaign and the Franco-German
war. It is time, however, that we came to the temperament of the
philosopher himself. It is indeed a platitude, that as man makes his
gods in his own image, so does the philosopher create his systems.
What is Aristotle's ideal of the _βίος θεωρήτικος_, and
his conception of the self-contemplative god but the erection into
a universal norm of the thinker's natural philosophic idiosyncrasy?
What is the elaborate "I and Me" of the cosmology of Fichte but the
attribution to the universe of the personal idiosyncrasies of Fichte,
the self-conscious Doppelgänger? And how Schopenhauer promoted sex
into the devil, whose heat animates this earthly hell, we have
already seen. What, then, was the impetus which impelled Nietzsche
to batter down the walls of the contemporary moral and philosophic
universe? The theory of an innate _joie de vivre_, a system highly if
not over-charged with vitality, supplies but half the answer. The real
explanation lies in the stiffening of this natural exuberance beneath
the tension of a grim incessant struggle with a nervous malady.
It is not actually necessary to go as far as the Swedish writer,
M. Bjerre, who finds in Nietzsche's deliberate and revolutionary
transvaluation of values that break up of the cerebral system from
its previous condition which signalises the earlier stages of general
paralysis. Yet Nietzsche's own writings, particularly his letters,
reveal how potent was the stimulus exercised on his ego by those
nervous headaches which hounded him over the Continent. To prevent
defeat his will had to be perpetually strained to the maximum pitch of
tension. The sweets of comfort being denied him, the only alternative
left was to find a kind of super-happiness in the ecstasies and
exultations of that Titanic contest which was perpetually fought on
the battlefield of his own person. Let him speak for himself: "I made
of my wish to get well, to live, my philosophy--it should, in fact, be
noted--the years when my vitality descended to its minimum were those
when I ceased to be a pessimist."
We have not, however, at this juncture space to elaborate further
the theory of the superman. Let it be enough to say that it is the
raising to the _n_th power of the spirit of struggling and aggressive
efficiency, and the venting of an over-full vitality by the creation of
new values out of the wealth of the individual ego. As, however, the
glorification of strength involves, and logically so, the degradation
of weakness, and "to build up a sanctuary it is necessary for a
sanctuary to be destroyed," it is not surprising that Nietzsche should
clear the ground for his new creations by a ferocious bombardment of
the crumbling ruins that still encumbered the site. Schopenhauer,
who had been the fount from which Nietzsche's philosophic youth had
drawn its inspiration before, as it were, he had found him out, is
always treated with a certain amount of respect. But the arch-enemy
was the, to him, poisonous system of altruism, self-annihilation, and
world-renouncement which was called Christianity.
The cynical may smile at the inordinate and concentrated frenzy of this
attack. "Is not your wildly militant prophet simply wasting his powder
and shot? Who in his senses ever heard of Christianity being taken _au
pied de la lettre_, even by the most orthodox of modern bishops? What
is it, to use another metaphor, but flogging a dead horse?" To which
Nietzsche's answer would be that it is by removing the foundations
that you remove also the superstructure, or to translate our metaphor,
"Let me kill Christianity, and I kill at the same time all that system
of altruism for altruism's sake, of abstract truth for the sake of
abstract truth, which is built on that hateful foundation." It may also
be observed that, even apart from the poetic and prophetic licence to
which a man writing under such circumstances would be legitimately
entitled, there are even now not wanting people who do in point of fact
take Christianity with all the implicit seriousness of the mediæval
monks or the early Fathers. It is, indeed, a phenomenon not without a
certain intrinsic humour, that almost at the very moment when Tolstoi
was making his pathetic efforts to resuscitate literal Christianity
with the abortive tears of pity, Nietzsche should swing along to
flagellate the semi-inanimate ghost of the bleeding God, in no monkish
spirit, forsooth, but with all the grim and scientific energy of the
most enthusiastic of executioners, compared to whom Voltaire was but
the most urbane of wits, and Heine the most innocuous of schoolboys.
Having thus taken a brief view of the targets, and of the implacable
and very serious spirit that animates the assailant, let us glance
briefly at the chief lines of attack.