Nietzsche is unquestionably a bold thinker, a Faust-like questioner,
and a Titan among philosophers. He is a man who understands that the
problem of all problems is the question, Is there an authority higher
than myself? And having discarded belief in God, he finds no authority
except pretensions.
Nietzsche apparently is only familiar with the sanctions of morality
and the criterion of good and evil as they are represented in the
institutions and thoughts established by history, and seeing how
frequently they serve as tools in the hands of the crafty for the
oppression of the unsophisticated masses of the people, he discards
them as utterly worthless. Hence his truly magnificent wrath, his
disgust, his contempt for underling man, for the masses, this muddy
stream of present mankind.
If Nietzsche had dug deeper, he would have found that there is after
all a deep significance in moral ideals, for there is an authority
above the self by which the worth of the self must be measured. Truth
is not a mere creature of the self, but is the comprehension of the
immutable eternal laws of being which constitute the norm of existence.
Our self, "that creating, willing, valuing 'I,' which (according to
Nietzsche) is the measure and value of all things," is itself measured
by that eternal norm of being, the existence of which Nietzsche does
not recognize.
What is true of Nietzsche applies in all fundamental questions also to
his predecessor, Max Stirner. It applies to individualism in any form
if carried to its consistent and most extreme consequences.
Nietzsche is blind to the truth that there is a norm above the self,
and that this norm is the source of duty and the object of religion;
he therefore denies the very existence of duty, of conviction, of
moral principles, of sympathy with the suffering, of authority in any
shape, and yet he dares to condemn man in the shape of the present
generation of mankind. What right has he, then, to judge the sovereign
self of to-day and to announce the coming of another self in the
overman? From the principles of his philosophical anarchism he has no
right to denounce mankind of to-day, as an underling; for if there is
no objective standard of worth, there is no sense in distinguishing
between the underman of to-day and the overman of a nobler future.
On this point, however, Nietzsche deviates from his predecessor
Stirner. The latter is more consistent as an individualist, but the
former appeals strongly to the egoism of the individual.
Nietzsche is a Titan and he is truly Titanic in his rebellion against
the smallness of everything that means to be an incarnation of what is
great and noble and holy. But he does not protest against the smallness
of the representatives of truth and right, he protests against truth
and right themselves, and thus he is not merely Titanic, but a genuine
Titan,--attempting to take the heavens by storm, a monster, not
superhuman but inhuman in proportions, in sentiment and in spirit.
Being ingenious, he is, in his way, a genius, but he is not evenly
balanced; he is eccentric and, not recognizing the authority of reason
and science, makes eccentricity his maxim. Thus his grandeur becomes
grotesque.
The spirit of negation, the mischief-monger Mephistopheles, says of
Faust with reference to his despair of reason and science:
"Reason and Knowledge only thou despise,
The highest strength in man that lies!...
And I shall have thee fast and sure."
--_Tr. by Bayard Taylor._
Being giant-like, the Titan Nietzsche has a sense only for things
of large dimensions. He fails to understand the significance of the
subtler relations of existence. He is clumsy like Gargantua; he is
coarse in his reasoning; he is narrow in his comprehension; his horizon
is limited. He sees only the massive effects of the great dynamical
changes brought about by brute force; he is blind to the quiet and slow
but more powerful workings of spiritual forces. The molecular forces
that are invisible to the eye transform the world more thoroughly than
hurricanes and thunderstorms; yet the strongest powers are the moral
laws, the curses of wrong-doing and oppression, and the blessings of
truthfulness, of justice, of good-will. Nietzsche sees them not; he
ignores them. He measures the worth of the overman solely by his brute
force.
If Nietzsche were right, the overman of the future who is going to take
possession of the earth will not be nobler and better, wiser and juster
than the present man, but more gory, more tiger-like, more relentless,
more brutal.
Nietzsche has a truly noble longing for the advent of the overman, but
he throws down the ladder on which man has been climbing up, and thus
losing his foothold, he falls down to the place whence mankind started
several millenniums ago.
We enjoy the rockets of Nietzsche's genius, we understand his
Faust-like disappointment as to the unavailableness of science such as
he knew it; we sympathize with the honesty with which he offered his
thoughts to the world; we recognize the flashes of truth which occur
in his sentences, uttered in the tone of a prophet; but we cannot help
condemning his philosophy as unsound in its basis, his errors being the
result of an immaturity of comprehension.
Nietzsche has touched upon the problem of problems, but he has not
solved it. He weighs the souls of his fellowmen and finds them
wanting; but his own soul is not less deficient. His philosophy is well
worth studying, but it is not a good guide through life. It is great
only as being the gravest error, boldly, conscientiously, and seriously
carried to its utmost extremes and preached as the latest word of
wisdom.
It has been customary that man should justify himself before the
tribunal of morality, but Nietzsche summons morality itself before
his tribunal. Morality justifies herself by calling on truth, but
the testimony of truth is ruled out, for truth--objective truth--is
denounced as a superstition of the dark ages. Nietzsche knows truth
only as a contemptible method of puny spirits to make existence
conceivable--a hopeless task! Nietzsche therefore finds morality guilty
as a usurper and a tyrant, and he exhorts all _esprits forts_ to shake
off the yoke.
We grant that the self should not be the slave of morality; it should
not feel the "ought" as a command; it should identify itself with it
and make its requirements the object of its own free will. Good-will on
earth will render the law redundant; but when you wipe out the ideal
of good-will itself together with its foundation, which is truth and
the recognition of truth, the struggle for existence will reappear
in its primitive fierceness, and mankind will return to the age of
savagery. Let the _esprits forts of Nietzsche's_ type try to realize
their master's ideal, and their attempts will soon lead to their own
perdition.
We read in _Der arme Teufel_,[1] a weekly whose radical editor would
not have been prevented by conventional reasons from joining the new
fad of Nietzscheanism, the following satirical comment on some modern
poet of original selfhood:
"'I am against matrimony because I am a poet Wife,
children, family life,--well, well! they may be good
enough for the man possessed of the herding instinct But
I object to trivialities in my own life. I want something
stimulating, sensation, poetry 1 A wife would be prosaic
to me, simply on account of being my wife; and children
who would call me papa would be disgusting. Poetry I need!
Poetry!' Thus he spoke to a friend, and when the latter
was gone continued his letter reproaching a waitress for
again asking for money and at the same time reflecting
upon the purity of her relations to the bartender who, she
pretended, was her cousin only...."
If marriage relations were abolished to-day, would not in the course of
time some new form of marriage be established? Those who are too proud
to utilize the experiences of past generations, will have to repeat
them for themselves and must wade through their follies, sins, errors,
and suffer all the consequences and undergo their penalties.
Nietzsche tries to produce a Cæsar by teaching his followers to imitate
the vices of a Catiline; he would raise gods by begetting Titans; he
endeavors to give a nobler and better standard to mankind, not by
lifting the people higher and rendering them more efficient, but by
depriving them of all wisdom and making them more pretentious.
If the ethics of Nietzsche were accepted to-day as authoritative, and
if people at large acted accordingly, the world would be benefited
in one respect, viz., hypocrisy would cease, and the selfishness of
mankind would manifest itself in all its nude bestiality. Passions
would have full sway; lust, robbery, jealousy, murder, and revenge
would increase, and Death in all forms of wild outbursts would reap
a richer harvest than he ever did in the days of prehistoric savage
life. The result would be a pruning on a grand scale, and after a few
bloody decades those only would survive who either by nature or by
hypocritical self-control deemed it best to keep the lower passions
and the too prurient instincts of their selfhood in proper check, and
then the old-fashioned rules of morality, which Nietzsche declared
antiquated, would be given a new trial in the new order of things. They
might receive a different sanction, but they would find recognition.
Nietzsche forgets that the present social order originated from that
general free-for-all fight which he commends, and that if we begin at
the start we should naturally run through the same or a similar course
of development to the same or very similar conditions. Will it not be
better to go on improving than to revert to the primitive state of
savagery?
There are superstitious notions about the nature of the sanction of
ethics, but for that reason the moral ideals of mankind remain as
firmly established as ever.
The self is not the standard of measurement for good and evil, right
and wrong, as Nietzsche claims in agreement with the sophists of old;
the self is only the condition to which and under which it applies.
There is no good and evil in the purely physical world, there is no
suffering, no pain, no anguish--all this originates with the rise of
organized animal life which is endowed with sentiency; and further
there is no goodness and badness, no morality until the animal rises to
the height of comprehending the nature of evil. The tiger is in himself
neither good nor bad, but he makes himself a cause of suffering to
others; and thus he is by them regarded as bad. Goodness and badness
are relative, but they are not for that reason unreal.
It is true that there is no "ought" in the world as an "ought"; nor are
there metaphysical ghosts of divine commandments revealing themselves.
But man learns the lesson how to avoid evil and reducing it to brief
rules which are easily remembered, he calls them "commandments."
Buddha was aware that there is no metaphysical ghost of an "ought," and
being the first positivist before positivism was ever thought of, his
decalogue is officially called "avoiding the ten evils," not "the ten
commandments," the latter being a popular term of later origin.
Granting that there is no metaphysical "ought" in the world and that
it finds application only in the domain of animate life through the
presence of the self or rather of many selves, we fail to see that
the self is the creator of the norm of good and evil. Granting also
that there are degrees of comprehending the nature of evil and that
different applications naturally result under different conditions,
we cannot for that reason argue that ethics are purely subjective and
that there is no objective norm that underlies the moral evolution of
mankind and comes out in the progress of civilization more and more in
its purity.
Nietzsche is like a schoolboy whose teacher is an inefficient pedant.
He rebels against his authority and having had but poor instruction
proclaims that the multiplication table is a mere superstition with
which the old man tries to enslave the free minds of his scholars. Are
there not different solutions possible of the same example and has not
every one to regard his own solution as the right solution? How can the
teacher claim that he is the standard of truth? Why, the very attempt
at setting up a standard of any kind is tyranny and the recognition of
it is a self-imposed slavery. There is no rightness save the rightness
that can be maintained in a general hand-to-hand contest, for it is
ultimately the fist that decides all controversies.
Nietzsche calls himself an atheist; he denies the existence of God
in any form, and thus carries atheism to an extreme where it breaks
down in self-contradiction. We understand by God (whether personal,
impersonal, or superpersonal) that something which determines the
course of life; the factors that shape the world, including ourselves;
the law to which we must adjust our conduct. Nietzsche enthrones the
self in the place of God, but for all practical purposes his God is
blunt success and survival of the fittest in the crude sense of the
term; for according to his philosophy the self must heed survival in
the struggle for existence alone, and that, therefore, is his God.
Nietzsche's God is power, i. e., overwhelming force, which allows the
wolf to eat the lamb. He ignores the power of the still small voice,
the effectiveness of law in the world which makes it possible that man,
the over-brute, is not the most ferocious, the most muscular, or the
strongest animal. Nietzsche regards the cosmic order, in accommodation
to which ethical codes have been invented, as a mere superstition. Thus
it will come to pass that Nietzsche's type of the overman, should it
really make its appearance on earth, would be wiped out as surely as
the lion, the king of the beasts, the proud pseudo-overbrute of the
animals, will be exterminated in course of time. The lion has a chance
for survival only behind the bars of the zoölogical gardens or when he
allows himself to be tamed by man, that weakling among the brutes whose
power has been built up by a comprehension of the sway of the invisible
laws of life, physical, mental and moral.
What is the secret of Nietzsche's success? While other men of greater
consistency, among them his predecessor Stirner, failed, he attained
an unparalleled fame, and his philosophy exercised an extraordinary
influence upon large classes of people not only in Germany but also
abroad, in Russia, in France, in the United States and even in
conservative England.
We must concede that Nietzsche possesses a poetic power of oratory; he
appeals to sentiment; he is not much of a thinker, not a philosopher,
but a leader and a prophet, and as such he stands for the most extreme
egoism. Nietzsche attempts to establish the absolute sovereignty of
the individual and grants a most irresponsible freedom to the man who
dares; and this principle of doing away with moral maxims has made him
popular.
The truth is that our moral sanctions are no longer accepted. People
still believe in God, in the authority of church and state, but their
belief is no longer a living faith. Whatever they may think of God, the
old God, the God of traditional dogmatism, is gone. He is no longer a
living power in the hearts of the people; and so, large masses rejoice
to have the proclamation frankly stated that God is dead, that they
need no longer fear hell, and that the chains of their slavery are
broken.
Nietzsche is consistent in his denial of the traditional sanctions. He
understands not only that there are no gods, that the powers of nature
as personifications do not exist, but that the laws of nature are mere
abstract generalizations. We need no longer believe in Hephaestos, the
god of fire; there is no use to bow the knee to him or do homage to his
divinity. Nor is there any truth in the existence of a phlogiston, a
metaphysical fire-stuff, or any fire essence; there are only scattered
facts of burning. Everything else is mere superstition. Generalizations
exist only in our imagination, and so we should get rid of the idea
that there is any truth at all. Science is a pretender which is apt to
make cowards of us. That man is wise who is not hampered by scruple or
doubt of any kind and simply follows the bent of his mind, subjecting
to himself every thing he finds, including his fellow human beings.
This bold and reckless proposition appeals to egoism and it seems so
true that abstract formulas and generalizations are empty. Weight
exists; there is gravity; there are particular phenomena of masses in
mutual attraction, but gravitation, the law of these actual happenings,
is a mere formula, an imaginary quantity, a mere thought about which we
need not worry. The law of gravitation is a human invention and has no
real existence in the realm of facts.
And the same would of course be true about the interrelations among
human beings in their social intercourse, too. All the several maxims
of conduct, which are called moral and constitute our code of ethics,
are built upon generalizations. There is no sanction for them. The gods
who were formerly supposed to be responsible for the several domains
of facts have died long ago. The Jewish deity called Elohim, the
Lord, entered upon the inheritance of the ancient gods, but he too had
to die. Thereupon his place was taken by metaphysical essences, pale
ghosts of a mysterious nature, but they too died and so the last shadow
of anything authoritative is gone. We are _en face du rien_; therefore
let us boldly enjoy our freedom. Let us be ourselves; let our passions
take their course; let us do wrong if it suits us; let us live without
consideration of anything, just as we please. There is no sanction of
moral maxims to be respected; there is no authority of conduct; there
is no judge; there is no evil, no wrong.
This seems pretty plausible to our modern generation raised in the
traditions of nominalism, but would we really ignore the law of
gravitation because the Newtonian formula is a man-made abstraction
and a mere generalization? Yet, if we do not give heed to it we fall,
and the same is true of any law of nature. Our sciences are mental
constructions; they are mind-made, and so far as they are built out
of the material of our experience they tally with facts and we call
them true. Our social interrelations, too, constitute conditions
observable in experience; they can be formulated in Jaws and applied
to practical life; they can be expressed in maxims of conduct and have
received various sanctions successively, the sanctions of religion,
the sanctions of metaphysics, the sanctions of science. In the age of
savagery the sanction of moral maxims was offered us in a mythological
dress. With the rise of monotheism our moral sanction came to us as
the command of a supreme ruler of the universe; in the age of abstract
philosophy as metaphysical principles, and in the age of science these
should be recognized as lessons of experience.
[1] May 13, 1809. Detroit, 949 Gratiot Ave.