Nietzsche's faithful sister took the place of wife and mother in his
clouding world. She made a home for him and she sat by and watched
him. They talked for hours--Nietzsche propped up with pillows, his old
ruddiness faded into a deathly white, and his Niagara of a moustache
showing dark against his pallid skin. They talked of Naumburg and the
days of long ago and the fiery prophet of the superman became simple
Brother Fritz. We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only
great, but also a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less
hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering
if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of
steaks, the dustiness of roads, the stuffiness of railway coaches and
the brigandage of gas companies.
Nietzsche's sister was the only human being that ever saw him
intimately, as a wife might have seen him. Her affection for him
was perfect and her influence over him perfect, too. Love and
understanding, faith and gentleness--these are the things which make
women the angels of joyous illusion. Lisbeth, the calm and trusting,
had all in boundless richness. There was, indeed, something noble,
and almost holy in the eagerness with which she sought her brother's
comfort and peace of mind during his days of stress and storm, and
magnified his virtues after he was gone.
[1] Thomas Common: "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and
Prophet;" London, 1901, p. 54.
[2] "Degeneration;" Eng. tr.: New York, 1895; pp. 415-471.
NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER
I
DIONYSUS VERSUS APOLLO
In one of the preceding chapters Nietzsche's theory of Greek tragedy
was given in outline and its dependence upon the data of Schopenhauer's
philosophy was indicated. It is now in order to examine this theory
a bit more closely and to trace out its origin and development with
greater dwelling upon detail. In itself it is of interest only as a
step forward in the art of literary criticism, but in its influence
upon Nietzsche's ultimate inquiries it has colored, to a measurable
extent, the whole stream of modern thought.
Schopenhauer laid down, as his cardinal principle, it will be recalled,
the idea that, in all the complex whirlpool of phenomena we call
human life, the mere will to survive is at the bottom of everything,
and that intelligence, despite its seeming kingship in civilization,
is nothing more, after all, than a secondary manifestation of this
primary will. In certain purely artificial situations, it may seem to
us that reason stands alone (as when, for example, we essay to solve
an abstract problem in mathematics), but in everything growing out of
our relations as human beings, one to the other, the old instinct of
race-and-self-preservation is plainly discernible. All of our acts,
when they are not based obviously and directly upon our yearning to eat
and take our ease and beget our kind, are founded upon our desire to
appear superior, in some way or other, to our fellow men about us, and
this desire for superiority, reduced to its lowest terms, is merely
a desire to face the struggle for existence--to eat and beget--under
more favorable conditions than those the world accords the average man.
"Happiness is the feeling that power increases--that resistance is
being overcome."[1]
Nietzsche went to Basel firmly convinced that these fundamental ideas
of Schopenhauer were profoundly true, though he soon essayed to make an
amendment to them. This amendment consisted in changing Schopenhauer's
"will to live" into "will to power." That which does not live, he
argued, cannot exercise a will to live, and when a thing is already
in existence, how can it strive after existence? Nietzsche voiced the
argument many times, but its vacuity is apparent upon brief inspection.
He started out, in fact, with an incredibly clumsy misinterpretation
of Schopenhauer's phrase. The philosopher of pessimism, when he said
"will to live" obviously meant, not will to begin living, but will to
continue living. Now, this will to continue living, if we are to accept
words at their usual meaning, is plainly identical, in every respect,
with Nietzsche's will to power. Therefore, Nietzsche's amendment was
nothing more than the coinage of a new phrase to express an old idea.
The unity of the two philosophers and the identity of the two phrases
are proved a thousand times by Nietzsche's own discourses. Like
Schopenhauer he believed that all human ideas were the direct products
of the unconscious and unceasing effort of all living creatures to
remain alive. Like Schopenhauer he believed that abstract ideas, in
man, arose out of concrete ideas, and that the latter arose out of
experience, which, in turn, was nothing more or less than an ordered
remembrance of the results following an endless series of endeavors to
meet the conditions of existence and so survive. Like Schopenhauer,
he believed that the criminal laws, the poetry, the cookery and the
religion of a race were alike expressions of this unconscious groping
for the line of least resistance.
As a philologist, Nietzsche's interest, very naturally, was fixed upon
the literature of Greece and Rome, and so it was but natural that his
first tests of Schopenhauer's doctrines should be made in that field.
Some time before this, he had asked himself (as many another man had
asked before him) why it was that the ancient Greeks, who were an
efficient and vigorous people, living in a green and sunny land, should
so delight in gloomy tragedies. One would fancy that a Greek, when
he set out to spend a pleasant afternoon, would seek entertainment
that was frivolous and gay. But instead, he often preferred to see
one of the plays of Thespis, Æschylus, Phrynichus or Pratinus, in
which the heroes fought hopeless battles with fate and died miserably,
in wretchedness and despair. Nietzsche concluded that the Greeks
had this liking for tragedy because it seemed to them to set forth,
truthfully and understandably, the conditions of life as they found
it: that it appeared to them as a reasonable and accurate picture
of human existence. The gods ordered the drama on the real stage of
the world; the dramatist ordered the drama on the mimic stage of the
theatre--and the latter attained credibility and verisimilitude in
proportion as it approached an exact imitation or reproduction of the
former. Nietzsche saw that this quality of realism was the essence of
all stage plays. "Only insofar as the dramatist," he said, "coalesces
with the primordial dramatist of the world, does he reach the true
function of his craft."[2] "Man posits himself as the standard.... A
race cannot do otherwise than thus acquiesce in itself."[3] In other
words, man is interested in nothing whatever that has no bearing upon
his own fate: he himself is his own hero. Thus the ancient Greeks were
fond of tragedy because it reflected their life in miniature. In the
mighty warriors who stalked the boards and defied the gods each Greek
recognized himself. In the conflicts on the stage he saw replicas of
that titanic conflict which seemed to him to be the eternal essence of
human existence.
But why did the Greeks regard life as a conflict? In seeking an answer
to this Nietzsche studied the growth of their civilization and of
their race ideas. These race ideas, as among all other peoples, were
visualized and crystallized in the qualities, virtues and opinions
attributed to the racial gods. Therefore, Nietzsche undertook an
inquiry into the nature of the gods set up by the Greeks, and
particularly into the nature of the two gods who controlled the general
scheme of Greek life, and, in consequence, of Greek art,--for art, as
we have seen, is nothing more or less than a race's view or opinion of
itself, i.e. an expression of the things it sees and the conclusions it
draws when it observes and considers itself. These gods were Apollo
and Dionysus.
Apollo, according to the Greeks, was the inventor of music, poetry and
oratory, and as such, became the god of all art. Under his beneficent
sway the Greeks became a race of artists and acquired all the
refinement and culture that this implies. But the art that he taught
them was essentially contemplative and subjective. It depicted, not so
much things as they were, as things as they had been. Thus it became
a mere record, and as such, exhibited repose as its chief quality.
Whether it were expressed as sculpture, architecture, painting or epic
poetry, this element of repose, or of action translated into repose,
was uppermost. A painting of a man running, no matter how vividly it
suggests the vitality and activity of the runner, is itself a thing
inert and lifeless. Architecture, no matter how much its curves suggest
motion and its hard lines the strength which may be translated into
energy, is itself a thing immovable. Poetry, so long as it takes the
form of the epic and is thus merely a chronicle of past actions, is as
lifeless, at bottom, as a tax list.
The Greeks, during Apollo's reign as god of art, thus turned art into
a mere inert fossil or record--a record either of human life itself or
of the emotions which the vicissitudes of life arouse in the spectator.
This notion of art was reflected in their whole civilization. They
became singers of songs and weavers of metaphysical webs rather than
doers of deeds, and the man who could carve a flower was more honored
among them than the man who could grow one. In brief, they began to
degenerate and go stale. Great men and great ideas grew few. They were
on the downward road.
What they needed, of course, was the shock of contact with some
barbarous, primitive people--an infusion of good red blood from some
race that was still fighting for its daily bread and had had no time
to grow contemplative and retrospective and fat. This infusion of red
blood came in good time, but instead of coming from without (as it did
years afterward in Rome, when the Goths swooped down from the North),
it came from within. That is to say, there was no actual invasion of
barbarian hordes, but merely an auto-reversion to simpler and more
primitive ideas, which fanned the dormant energy of the Greeks into
flame and so allowed them to accomplish their own salvation. This
impulse came in the form of a sudden craze for a new god--Bacchus
Dionysus.
Bacchus was a rude, boisterous fellow and the very antithesis of the
quiet, contemplative Apollo. We remember him today merely as the god of
wine, but in his time he stood, not only for drinking and carousing,
but also for a whole system of art and a whole notion of civilization.
Apollo represented the life meditative; Bacchus Dionysus represented
the life strenuous. The one favored those forms of art by which human
existence is halted and embalmed in some lifeless medium--sculpture,
architecture, painting or epic poetry. The other was the god of life
in process of actual being, and so stood for those forms of art which
are not mere records or reflections of past existence, but brief
snatches of present existence itself--dancing, singing, music and the
drama.
It will be seen that this barbarous invasion of the new god and his
minions made a profound change in the whole of Greek culture. Instead
of devoting their time to writing epics, praising the laws, splitting
philosophical hairs and hewing dead marble, the Greeks began to
question all things made and ordained and to indulge in riotous and
gorgeous orgies, in which thousands of maidens danced and hundreds of
poets chanted songs of love and war, and musicians vied with cooks
and vintners to make a grand delirium of joy. The result was that the
entire outlook of the Greeks, upon history, upon morality and upon
human life, was changed. Once a people of lofty introspection and
elegant repose, they became a race of violent activity and strong
emotions. They began to devote themselves, not to writing down the
praises of existence as they had found it, but to the task of improving
life and of widening the scope of present and future human activity and
the bounds of possible human happiness.[4]
But in time there came a reaction and Apollo once more triumphed. He
reigned for awhile, unsteadily and uncertainly, and then, again, the
pendulum swung to the other side. Thus the Greeks swayed from one
god to the other. During Apollo's periods of ascendancy they were
contemplative and imaginative, and man, to them, seemed to reach his
loftiest heights when he was most the historian. But when Dionysus was
their best-beloved, they bubbled over with the joy of life, and man
seemed, not an historian, but a maker of history--not an artist, but
a work of art. In the end, they verged toward a safe middle ground
and began to weigh, with cool and calm, the ideas represented by the
two gods. When they had done so, they came to the conclusion that it
was not well to give themselves unreservedly to either. To attain
the highest happiness, they decided, humanity required a dash of
both. There was need in the world for dionysians, to give vitality an
outlet and life a purpose, and there was need, too, for apollonians,
to build life's monuments and read its lessons. They found that true
civilization meant constant conflict between the two--between the
dreamer and the man of action, between the artist who builds temples
and the soldier who burns them down, between the priest and policeman
who insist upon the permanence of laws and customs as they are and the
criminal and reformer and conqueror who insist that they be changed.
When they had learned this lesson, the Greeks began to soar to heights
of culture and civilization that, in the past, had been utterly beyond
them, and so long as they maintained the balance between Apollo
and Dionysus they continued to advance. But now and again, one god
or the other grew stronger, and then there was a halt. When Apollo
had the upper hand, Greece became too contemplative and too placid.
When Dionysus was the victor, Greece became wild and thoughtless
and careless of the desires of others, and so turned a bit toward
barbarism. This seesawing continued for a long while, but Apollo was
the final victor--if victor he may be called. In the eternal struggle
for existence Greece became a mere looker-on. Her highest honors went
to Socrates, a man who tried to reduce all life to syllogisms. Her
favorite sons were rhetoricians, dialecticians and philosophical
cobweb-spinners. She placed ideas above deeds. And in the end, as all
students of history know, the state that once ruled the world descended
to senility and decay, and dionysians from without overran it, and it
perished in anarchy and carnage. But with this we have nothing to do.
Nietzsche noticed that tragedy was most popular in Greece during
the best days of the country's culture, when Apollo and Dionysus
were properly balanced, one against the other. This ideal balancing
between the two gods was the result, he concluded, not of conscious,
but of unconscious impulses. That is to say, the Greeks did not call
parliaments and discuss the matter, as they might have discussed a
question of taxes, but acted entirely in obedience to their racial
instinct. This instinct--this will to live or desire for power--led
them to feel, without putting it into words, or even, for awhile,
into definite thoughts, that they were happiest and safest and most
vigorous, and so best able to preserve their national existence, when
they kept to the golden mean. They didn't reason it out; they merely
felt it.
But as Schopenhauer shows us, instinct, long exercised, means
experience, and the memory of experience, in the end, crystallizes into
what we call intelligence or reason. Thus the unconscious Greek feeling
that the golden mean best served the race, finally took the form of
an idea: _i.e._ that human life was an endless conflict between two
forces, or impulses. These, as the Greeks saw them, were the dionysian
impulse to destroy, to burn the candle, to "use up" life; and the
apollonian impulse to preserve. Seeing life in this light, it was but
natural that the Greeks should try to exhibit it in the same light on
their stage. And so their tragedies were invariably founded upon some
deadly and unending conflict--usually between a human hero and the
gods. In a word, they made their stage plays set forth life as they saw
it and found it, for, like all other human beings, at all times and
everywhere, they were more interested in life as they found it than in
anything else on the earth below or in the vasty void above.
When Nietzsche had worked out this theory of Greek tragedy and of Greek
life, he set out, at once, to apply it to modern civilization, to see
if it could explain certain ideas of the present as satisfactorily as
it had explained one great idea of the past. He found that it could:
that men were still torn between the apollonian impulse to conform and
moralize and the dionysian impulse to exploit and explore. He found
that all mankind might be divided into two classes: the apollonians who
stood for permanence and the dionysians who stood for change. It was
the aim of the former to live in strict obedience to certain invariable
rules, which found expression as religion, law and morality. It was the
aim of the latter to live under the most favorable conditions possible;
to adapt themselves to changing circumstances, and to avoid the snares
of artificial, permanent rules.
Nietzsche believed that an ideal human society would be one in which
these two classes of men were evenly balanced--in which a vast,
inert, religious, moral slave class stood beneath a small, alert,
iconoclastic, immoral, progressive master class. He held that this
master class--this aristocracy of efficiency--should regard the slave
class as all men now regard the tribe of domestic beasts: as an order
of servitors to be exploited and turned to account. The aristocracy
of Europe, though it sought to do this with respect to the workers
of Europe, seemed to him to fail miserably, because it was itself
lacking in true efficiency. Instead of practising a magnificent
opportunism and so adapting itself to changing conditions, it stood
for formalism and permanence. Its fetish was property in land and the
worship of this fetish had got it into such a rut that it was becoming
less and less fitted to survive, and was, indeed, fast sinking into
helpless parasitism. Its whole color and complexion were essentially
apollonic.[5]
Therefore Nietzsche preached the gospel of Dionysus, that a new
aristocracy of efficiency might take the place of this old aristocracy
of memories and inherited glories. He believed that it was only in
this way that mankind could hope to forge ahead. He believed that
there was need in the world for a class freed from the handicap of law
and morality, a class acutely adaptable and immoral; a class bent on
achieving, not the equality of all men, but the production, at the top,
of the superman.
[1] "_Der Antichrist_," § 2.
[2] "_Die Geburt der Tragödie_," § 5.
[3] "_Götzendämmerung_" ix, § 19.
[4] "This enrichment of consciousness among the Greeks ... showed
itself first in the development of lyric poetry, in which the gradual
transition from the expression of universal religious and political
feeling to that which is personal and individual formed a typical
process." Dr. Wilhelm Windelband, "A History of Ancient Philosophy,"
tr. by H. E. Cushman; p. 18; New York, 1901.
[5] _Vide_ the chapter on "Civilization."
II
THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
It may be urged with some reason, by those who have read the preceding
chapter carefully, that the Nietzschean argument, so far, has served
only to bring us face to face with a serious contradiction. We have
been asked to believe that all human impulses are merely expressions
of the primary instinct to preserve life by meeting the changing
conditions of existence, and in the same breath we have been asked to
believe, too, that the apollonian idea--which, like all other ideas,
must necessarily be a result of this instinct--destroys adaptability
and so tends to make life extra hazardous and difficult and progress
impossible. Here we have our contradiction: the will to live is
achieving, not life, but death. How are we to explain it away? How
are we to account for the fact that the apollonian idea at the bottom
of Christian morality, for example, despite its origin in the will
to live, has an obvious tendency to combat free progress? How are we
to account for the fact that the church, which is based upon this
Christian morality, is, always has been and ever will be a bitter and
implacable foe of good health, intellectual freedom, self-defense and
every other essential factor of efficiency?
Nietzsche answers this by pointing out that an idea, while undoubtedly
an effect or expression of the primary life instinct, is by no means
identical with it. The latter manifests itself in widely different acts
as conditions change: it is necessarily opportunistic and variable.
The former, on the contrary, has a tendency to survive unchanged, even
after its truth is transformed into falsity. That is to say, an idea
which arises from a true and healthy instinct may survive long after
this instinct itself, in consequence of the changing conditions of
existence, has disappeared and given place to an instinct diametrically
opposite. This survival of ideas we call morality. By its operation the
human race is frequently saddled with the notions of generations long
dead and forgotten. Thus we modern Christians still subscribe to the
apollonian morality of the ancient Jews--our moral forebears--despite
the fact that their ideas were evolved under conditions vastly
different from those which confront us today. Thus the expressions of
the life instinct, by obtaining an artificial and unnatural permanence,
turn upon the instinct itself and defeat its beneficent purpose. Thus
our contradiction is explained.
To make this rather complicated reasoning more clear it is necessary
to follow Nietzsche through the devious twists and windings of his
exhaustive inquiry into the origin of moral codes. In making this
inquiry he tried to rid himself of all considerations of authority
and reverence, just as a surgeon, in performing a difficult and
painful operation, tries to rid himself of all sympathy and emotion.
Adopting this plan, he found that a code of morals was nothing more
than a system of customs, laws and ideas which had its origin in the
instinctive desire of some definite race to live under conditions which
best subserved its own welfare. The morality of the Egyptians, he
found, was one thing, and the morality of the Goths was another. The
reason for the difference lay in the fact that the environment of the
Egyptians--the climate of their land, the nature of their food supply
and the characteristics of the peoples surrounding them--differed
from the environment of the Goths. The morality of each race was, in
brief, its consensus of instinct, and once having formulated it and
found it good, each sought to give it force and permanence. This was
accomplished by putting it into the mouths of the gods. What was once
a mere expression of instinct thus became the mandate of a divine
law-giver. What was once a mere attempt to meet imminent--and usually
temporary--conditions of existence, thus became a code of rules to be
obeyed forever, no matter how much these conditions of existence might
change. Wherefore, Nietzsche concluded that the chief characteristic of
a moral system was its tendency to perpetuate itself unchanged, and to
destroy all who questioned it or denied it.[1]