By Abraham Solomon.
_A Letter to The New York Evening Post._
Sir: Those who trace the German militaristic doctrines to Nietzsche's
influence commit Pastor Mander's sin when he told Mrs. Alving to bar
from her library a book which he had never read. Nietzsche was an
inveterate enemy of efficiency, astigmatic with regard to practical
life, and he never worked out a philosophy in the accepted sense of the
term. He was a lyric poet who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain
the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky
void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian
hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and
against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian
doctrine. There he worked out the mystic idea of "Eternal Recurrence"
and his song of Zarathustra with the bell strokes of noon.
What he knew of history he used for an analysis of values, and not for
State polity. He shrank from the irritations of reality, and he had
little patience with the national mania cultivated after Sedan, warning
his country that their victory was not one of a superior culture, that
Germany had no style but a barbaric mixture of many styles; and he
pointed out the essential difference between culture and erudition.
His unfinished work, "The Will to Power," was an attempt to house his
lyric passions in an architectural frame. The façade of the structure,
as posthumously revealed to us, is an indication that he was really
engaged in building a Tower of Babel. Power, Affirmation, Yea-Saying he
considered the attributes of life, and he found in them recompense for
his weakness and his lack of capacity for happiness. He was a master of
the exquisite nuances of vision, but since he touched real life at the
circumference, and not at the centre, his philosophical valuations are
bizarre, and have only a literary value.
It is superficial to make Treitschke and Bernhardi his disciples, as
some American writers have made Roosevelt his disciple. Treitschke is a
heavy-footed historian who raised the axiom of self-preservation into a
philosophy of force. Von Bernhardi's book, though extreme in its
expression, is based on the fundamental truth that if Germany desired a
just proportion of oversea territories (a proportion denied her by
England) she would have to gain it by force of arms. In the development
of this idea he makes many generalizations calculated to dazzle the
multitude and to imbue it with the courage to expansion. Treitschke
would have rested in obscurity but for the war; Bernhardi does not
pretend to talents as a philosopher.
The real origin of Germany's policy in the last forty years may be
derived from the eminently practical and direct mind of Bismarck. From
reading of history he learned that chicane and force had been utilized
as the roads to power, of which fact he found ample demonstration in the
histories of England and Russia. He proved himself a true adept by using
chicane and force to achieve German unity, after the theorists had
failed.
Those who glibly condemn a lyric philosopher in order to make out a case
against Germany reveal the weakness of their position. It is strange
that these lantern-eyed critics haven't cited Heine as an enemy of
democracy because he adored Napoleon. Was it because Heine lived for
years in Paris on the adulation of advanced feminines?