the standpoint of justice was a bad standpoint in the life of nations.
What is significant of Nietzsche is his love of fighting for its
own sake, in contrast to the modern humanitarian view. To Nietzsche
the greatness of a movement is to be measured by the sacrifices it
demands. The hygiene which keeps alive millions of weak and useless
beings who ought rather to die, is to him no true progress. A dead
level of mediocre happiness assured to the largest possible majority
of the miserable creatures we nowadays call men, would be to him no
true progress. But to him, as to Renan, the rearing of a human species
higher and stronger than that which now surrounds us (the "Superman"),
even if this could only be achieved by the sacrifice of masses of such
men as we know, would be a great, a real progress. Nietzsche's visions,
put forth in all seriousness, of the training of the Superman and his
assumption of the mastery of the world, bear so strong a resemblance
to Renan's dreams, thrown out half in jest, of a new Asgard, a regular
manufactory of Æsir (_Dialogues philosophiques_, 117), that we can
scarcely doubt the latter's influence. But what Renan wrote under the
overwhelming impression of the Paris Commune, and, moreover, in the
form of dialogue, allowing both _pro_ and _con_. to be heard, has
crystallised in Nietzsche into dogmatic conviction. One is therefore
surprised and hurt to find that Nietzsche never mentions Renan
otherwise than grudgingly. He scarcely alludes to the aristocratic
quality of his intellect, but he speaks with repugnance of that respect
for the gospel of the humble which Renan everywhere discloses, and
which is undeniably at variance with his hope of the foundation of a
breeding establishment for supermen.
Renan, and after him Taine, turned against the almost religious
feelings which were long entertained in the new Europe towards the
first French Revolution. Renan regretted the Revolution betimes on
national grounds; Taine, who began by speaking warmly of it, changed
his mind on closer inquiry. Nietzsche follows in their footsteps. It
is natural for modern authors, who feel themselves to be the children
of the Revolution, to sympathise with the men of the great revolt;
and certainly the latter do not receive their due in the present
anti-revolutionary state of feeling in Europe. But these authors, in
their dread of what in political jargon is called Cæsarism, and in
their superstitious belief in mass movements, have overlooked the fact
that the greatest revolutionaries and liberators are not the united
small, but the few great; not the small ungenerous, but the great
and generous, who are willing to bestow justice and well-being and
intellectual growth upon the rest.
There are two classes of revolutionary spirits: those who feel
instinctively drawn to Brutus, and those who equally instinctively are
attracted by Cæsar. Cæsar is the great type; neither Frederick the
Great nor Napoleon could claim more than a part of his qualities. The
modern poetry of the 'forties teems with songs in praise of Brutus, but
no poet has sung Cæsar. Even a poet with so little love for democracy
as Shakespeare totally failed to recognise his greatness; he gave us
a pale caricature of his figure and followed Plutarch in glorifying
Brutus at his expense. Even Shakespeare could not see that Cæsar placed
a very different stake on the table of life from that of his paltry
murderer. Cæsar was descended from Venus; in his form was grace. His
mind had the grand simplicity which is the mark of the greatest; his
nature was nobility. He, from whom even to-day all supreme power takes
its name, had every attribute that belongs to a commander and ruler
of the highest rank. Only a few men of the Italian Renaissance have
reached such a height of genius. His life was a guarantee of all the
progress that could be accomplished in those days. Brutus's nature was
doctrine, his distinguishing mark the narrowness that seeks to bring
back dead conditions and that sees omens of a call in the accident of
a name. His style was dry and laborious, his mind unfertile. His vice
was avarice, usury his delight. To him the provinces were conquests
beyond the pale. He had five senators of Salamis starved to death
because the town could not pay. And on account of a dagger-thrust,
which accomplished nothing and hindered nothing of what it was meant
to hinder, this arid brain has been made a sort of genius of liberty,
merely because men have failed to understand what it meant to have the
strongest, richest and noblest nature invested with supreme power.
From what has been said above it will easily be understood that
Nietzsche derives justice entirely from the active emotions, since in
his view revengeful feelings are always low. He does not dwell on this
point, however. Older writers had seen in the instinct of retaliation
the origin of punishment. Stuart Mill, in his _Utilitarianism_,
derived justice from already established punitive provisions (_justum_
from _jussum_), which were precautionary measures, not reprisals.
Rée, in his book on the _Origin of Conscience_, defended the kindred
proposition that punishment is not a consequence of the sense of
justice, but _vice versa_. The English philosophers in general derive
the bad conscience from punishment. The value of the latter is supposed
to consist in awakening a sense of guilt in the delinquent.
Against this Nietzsche enters a protest. He maintains that punishment
only hardens and benumbs a man; in fact, that the judicial procedure
itself prevents the criminal from regarding his conduct as
reprehensible; since he is made to witness precisely the same kind of
acts as those he has committed--spying, entrapping, outwitting and
torturing--all of which are sanctioned when exercised against him in
the cause of justice. For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken
of the criminal's "sin"; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and
looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took
his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore
it with the same fatalism with which the Russians suffer to this day.
In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make
him "better."
The bad conscience, then, is still unexplained. Nietzsche proposes the
following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated
morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the
most radical change he has ever experienced--when he found himself
imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was inviolable. All
the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness,
cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been
honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous,
and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to
a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts
classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a
dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these
instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on
the man himself--feelings of enmity, cruelty, delight in change, in
hazard, violence, persecution, destruction--and thus the bad conscience
originated.
When the State came into existence--not by a social contract, as
Rousseau and his contemporaries assumed--but by a frightful tyranny
imposed by a conquering race upon a more numerous, but unorganised
population, then all the latter's instinct of freedom turned inwards;
its active force and will to power were directed against man himself.
And this was the soil which bore such ideals of beauty as self-denial,
self-sacrifice, unselfishness. The delight in self-sacrifice is in its
origin a phase of cruelty; the bad conscience is a will for self-abuse.
Then by degrees guilt came to be felt as a debt, to the past, to the
ancestors; a debt that had to be paid back in sacrifices--at first
of nourishment in its crudest sense--in marks of honour and in
obedience; for all customs, as the work of ancestors, are at the same
time their commands.[7] There is a constant dread of not giving them
enough; the firstborn, human and animal, are sacrificed to them. Fear
of the founder grows in proportion as the power of the race increases.
Sometimes he becomes transformed into a god, in which the origin of the
god from fear is clearly seen.
The feeling of owing a debt to the deity steadily grew through the
centuries, until the recognition of the Christian deity as universal
god brought about the greatest possible outburst of guilty feeling.
Only in our day is any noticeable diminution of this sense of guilt to
be traced; but where the consciousness of sin reaches its culminating
point, there the bad conscience eats its way like a cancer, till the
sense of the impossibility of paying the debt--atoning for the sin--is
supreme and with it is combined the idea of eternal punishment. A
curse is now imagined to have been laid upon the founder of the race
(Adam), and all sin becomes original sin. Indeed, the evil principle
is attributed to Nature herself, from whose womb man has sprung--until
we arrive at the paradoxical expedient in which tormented Christendom
has found a temporary consolation for two thousand years: God offers
himself for the guilt of mankind, pays himself in his own flesh and
blood.
What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has
turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts
have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to
his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation
of reality applied to God's sanctity, his capacity of judge and
executioner, and in the next place to eternity, the "Beyond," pain
without end, eternal punishment in hell.
In order rightly to understand the origin of ascetic ideals, we must,
moreover, consider that the earliest generations of spiritual and
contemplative natures lived under a fearful pressure of contempt on
the part of the hunters and warriors. The unwarlike element in them
was despicable. They had no other means of holding their own than that
of inspiring fear. This they could only do by cruelty to themselves,
mortification and self-discipline in a hermit's life. As priests,
soothsayers and sorcerers they then struck superstitious terror into
the masses. The ascetic priest is the unsightly larva from which the
healthy philosopher has emerged. Under the dominion of the priests our
earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space,
peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with
life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy
and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
Nevertheless the self-contradiction we find in asceticism--life turned
_against_ life--is of course only apparent. In reality the ascetic
ideal corresponds to a decadent life's profound need of healing and
tending. It is an ideal that points to depression and exhaustion;
by its help life struggles against death. It is life's device for
self-preservation. Its necessary antecedent is a morbid condition in
the tamed human being, a disgust with life, coupled with the desire to
be something else, to be somewhere else, raised to the highest pitch of
emotion and passion.
The ascetic priest is the embodiment of this very wish. By its power
he keeps the whole herd of dejected, fainthearted, despairing and
unsuccessful creatures, fast to life. The very fact that he himself is
sick makes him their born herdsman. If he were healthy, he would turn
away with loathing from all this eagerness to re-label weakness, envy,
Pharisaism and false morality as virtue. But, being himself sick, he is
called upon to be an attendant in the great hospital of sinners--the
Church. He is constantly occupied with sufferers who seek the cause
of their pain outside themselves; he teaches the patient that the
guilty cause of his pain is himself. Thus he diverts the rancour of the
abortive man and makes him less harmful, by letting a great part of his
resentment recoil on himself. The ascetic priest cannot properly be
called a physician; he mitigates suffering and invents consolations of
every kind, both narcotics and stimulants.
The problem was to contend with fatigue and despair, which had seized
like an epidemic upon great masses of men. Many remedies were tried.
First, it was sought to depress vitality to the lowest degree: not
to will, not to desire, not to work, and so on; to become apathetic
(Pascal's _Il faut s'abêtir_). The object was sanctification, a
hypnotising of all mental life, a relaxation of every purpose,
and consequently freedom from pain. In the next place, mechanical
activity was employed as a narcotic against states of depression: the
"blessing of labour." The ascetic priest, who has to deal chiefly
with sufferers of the poorer classes, reinterprets the task of the
unfortunate drudge for him, making him see in it a benefit. Then again,
the prescription of a little, easily accessible joy, is a favourite
remedy for depression; such as gladdening others, helping them in love
of one's neighbour. Finally, the decisive cure is to organise all
the sick into an immense hospital, to found a congregation of them.
The disinclination that accompanies the sense of weakness is thereby
combated, since the mass feels strong in its inner cohesion.
But the chief remedy of the ascetic priest was, after all, his
reinterpretation of the feeling of guilt as "sin." The inner suffering
was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares
the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a
hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out.
Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze
of the sinner, staring--in spite of Job--at guilt as the only cause
of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the
hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More
pain! More pain!" Everything served the ascetic ideal. And then arose
epidemics like those of St. Vitus's dance and the flagellants, witches'
hysteria and the wholesale delirium of extravagant sects (which still
lingers in otherwise beneficially disciplined bodies such as the
Salvation Army).
The ascetic ideal has as yet no real assailants; there is no decided
prophet of a new ideal. Inasmuch as since the time of Copernicus
science has constantly tended to deprive man of his earlier belief in
his own importance, its influence is rather favourable to asceticism
than otherwise. At present the only real enemies and underminers of the
ascetic ideal are to be found in the charlatans of that ideal, in its
hypocritical champions, who excite and maintain distrust of it.
As the senselessness of suffering was felt to be a curse, the ascetic
ideal gave it a meaning; a meaning which brought a new flood of
suffering with it, but which was better than none. In our day a new
ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition
of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new
culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture.
[7] Compare Lassalle's theory of the original religion of Rome. G.
Brandes; _Ferdinand Lassalle_ (London and New York, 1911), pp. 76 ff.
5.
Among Nietzsche's works there is a strange book which bears the title,
_Thus Spake Zarathustra_. It consists of four parts, written during the
years 1883-85, each part in about ten days, and conceived chapter by
chapter on long walks--"with a feeling of inspiration, as though each
sentence had been shouted in my ear," as Nietzsche wrote in a private
letter.
The central figure and something of the form are borrowed from the
Persian _Avesta_. Zarathustra is the mystical founder of a religion
whom we usually call Zoroaster. His religion is the religion of purity;
his wisdom is cheerful and dauntless, as that of one who laughed at his
birth; his nature is light and flame. The eagle and the serpent, who
share his mountain cave, the proudest and the wisest of beasts, are
ancient Persian symbols.
This work contains Nietzsche's doctrine in the form, so to speak, of
religion. It is the Koran, or rather the Avesta, which he was impelled
to leave--obscure and profound, high-soaring and remote from reality,
prophetic and intoxicated with the future, filled to the brim with the
personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself.
Among modern books that have adopted this tone and employed this
symbolic and allegorical style may be mentioned Mickiewicz's _Book of
the Polish Pilgrims_, Slowacki's Anheli, and The Words of a Believer,
by Lamennais, who was influenced by Mickiewicz. A newer work, known
to Nietzsche, is Carl Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881).
But all these books, with the exception of Spitteler's, are biblical
in their language. Zarathustra, on the other hand, is a book of
edification for free spirits.
Nietzsche himself gave this book the highest place among his writings.
I do not share this view. The imaginative power which sustains it is
not sufficiently inventive, and a certain monotony is inseparable from
an archaistic presentment by means of types.
But it is a good book for those to have recourse to who are unable
to master Nietzsche's purely speculative works; it contains all his
fundamental ideas in the form of poetic recital. Its merit is a style
that from the first word to the last is full-toned, sonorous and
powerful; now and then rather unctuous in its combative judgments and
condemnations; always expressive of self-joy, nay, self-intoxication,
but rich in subtleties as in audacities, sure, and at times great.
Behind this style lies a mood as of calm mountain air, so light, so
ethereally pure, that no infection, no bacteria can live in it--no
noise, no stench, no dust assails it, nor does any path lead up.
Clear sky above, open sea at the mountain's foot, and over all a heaven
of light, an abyss of light, an azure bell, a vaulted silence above
roaring waters and mighty mountain-chains. On the heights Zarathustra
is alone with himself, drawing in the pure air in full, deep breaths,
alone with the rising sun, alone with the heat of noon, which does not
impair the freshness, alone with the voices of the gleaming stars at
night.
A good, deep book it is. A book that is bright in its joy of life, dark
in its riddles, a book for spiritual mountain-climbers and dare-devils
and for the few who are practised in the great contempt of man that
loathes the crowd, and in the great love of man that only loathes so
deeply because it has a vision of a higher, braver humanity, which it
seeks to rear and train.
Zarathustra has sought the refuge of his cave out of disgust with
petty happiness and petty virtues. He has seen that men's doctrine
of virtue and contentment makes them ever smaller: their goodness is
in the main a wish that no one may do them any harm; therefore they
forestall the others by doing them a little good. This is cowardice
and is called virtue. True, they are at the same time quite ready to
attack and injure, but only those who are once for all at their mercy
and with whom it is safe to take liberties. This is called bravery and
is a still baser cowardice. But when Zarathustra tries to drive out the
cowardly devils in men, the cry is raised against him, "Zarathustra is
godless."
He is lonely, for all his former companions have become apostates;
their young hearts have grown old, and not old even, only weary and
slothful, only commonplace--and this they call becoming pious again.
"Around light and liberty they once fluttered like gnats and young
poets, and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles."
They have understood their age. They chose their time well. "For now do
all night-birds again fly abroad. Now is the hour of all that dread the
light." Zarathustra loathes the great city as a hell for anchorites'
thoughts. "All lusts and vices are here at home; but here are also
the virtuous, much appointable and appointed virtue. Much appointable
virtue with scribe-fingers and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh,
blessed with little breast-stars and padded, haunchless daughters. Here
is also much piety and much devout spittle-licking and honey-slavering
before the God of hosts. For 'from on high' drippeth the star and the
gracious spittle; and upward longeth every starless bosom."
And Zarathustra loathes the State, loathes it as Henrik Ibsen did and
more profoundly than he.
To him the State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Its fundamental
lie is that it is the people. No; creative spirits were they who
created the people and gave it a faith and a love; thus they served
life; every people is peculiar to itself, but the State is everywhere
the same. The State is to Zarathustra that "where the slow suicide of
all is called life." The State is for the many too many. Only where the
State leaves oft does the man who is not superfluous begin; the man who
is a bridge to the Superman.
From states Zarathustra has fled up to his mountain, into his cave.
In forbearance and pity lay his greatest danger. Rich in, the little
lies of pity he dwelt among men.
"Stung from head to foot by poisonous flies and hollowed out like a
stone by many drops of malice, thus did I sit among them, saying to
myself: Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness. Especially they
who call themselves the good, they sting in all innocence, they lie in
all innocence; how could they be just towards me?
"He who dwelleth among the good, him teacheth pity to lie. Pity
breedeth bad air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is
unfathomable.
"Their stiff wise men did I call wise, not stiff. Their grave-diggers
did I call searchers and testers--thus did I learn to confound speech.
The grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. From old refuse arise
evil exhalations. Upon the mountains one should live."
And with blessed nostrils he breathes again the freedom of the
mountains. His nose is now released from the smell of all that is
human. There sits Zarathustra with old broken tables of the law around
him and new half-written tables, awaiting his hour; the hour when the
lion shall come with the flock of doves, strength in company with
gentleness, to do homage to him. And he holds out to men a new table,
upon which such maxims as these are written--
Spare not thy neighbour! My great love for the remotest ones commands
it. Thy neighbour is something that must be surpassed.
Say not: I will do unto others as I would they should do unto me. What
_thou_ doest, that can no man do to thee again. There is no requital.
Do not believe that thou mayst not rob. A right which thou canst seize
upon, shalt thou never allow to be given thee.
Beware of good men. They never speak the truth. For all that they
call evil--the daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay,
the deep disgust with men, the will and the power to cut into the
quick--all this must be present where a truth is to be born.
All the past is at man's mercy. But, this being so, it might happen
that the rabble became master and drowned all time in its shallow
waters, or that a tyrant usurped it all. Therefore we need a new
nobility, to be the adversary of all rabble and all tyranny, and to
inscribe on new tables the word "noble." Certainly not a nobility
that can be bought, nor a nobility whose virtue is love of country.
No, teaches Zarathustra, exiles shall ye be from your fatherlands
and forefatherlands. Not the land of your fathers shall ye love, but
your children's land. This love is the new nobility--love of that new
land, the undiscovered, far-off country in the remotest sea. To your
children shall ye make amends for the misfortune of being your fathers'
children. Thus shall ye redeem all the past.
Zarathustra is full of lenity. Others have said: Thou shalt not commit
adultery. Zarathustra teaches: The honest should say to each other,
"Let us see whether our love continue; let us fix a term, that we may
find out whether we desire a longer term." What cannot be bent, will be
broken. A woman said to Zarathustra, "Indeed, I broke the marriage, but
first did the marriage break me."
Zarathustra is without mercy. It has been said: Push not a leaning
waggon. But Zarathustra says: That which is ready to fall, shall ye
also push. All that belongs to our day is falling and decaying. No one
can preserve it, but Zarathustra will even help it to fall faster.
Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every
challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing
by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not
teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat
with enemies ye despise.