in the absolute sense has nothing to do with truth, and that it is,
in fact, truth's exact antithesis. Absolute truth necessarily implies
eternal truth. The statement that a man and a woman are unlike was true
on the day the first man and woman walked the earth and it will be true
so long as there are men and women. Such a statement approaches very
near our ideal of an absolute truth. But the theory that humility is
a virtue is not an absolute truth, for while it was undoubtedly true
in ancient Judea, it was not true in ancient Greece and is debatable,
to say the least, in modern Europe and America. The Western Catholic
Church, despite its extraordinarily successful efforts at permanence,
has given us innumerable proofs that laws, in the long run, always turn
upon themselves. The popes were infallible when they held that the
earth was flat and they were infallible when they decided that it was
round--and so we reach a palpable absurdity. Therefore, we may lay it
down as an axiom that morality, in itself, is the enemy of truth, and
that, for at least half of the time, by the mathematical doctrine of
probabilities, it is necessarily untrue.
If this is so, why should any man bother about moral rules and
regulations? Why should any man conform to laws formulated by a people
whose outlook on the universe probably differed diametrically from
his own? Why should any man obey a regulation which is denounced, by
his common-sense, as a hodge-podge of absurdities, and why should he
model his whole life upon ideals invented to serve the temporary needs
of a forgotten race of some past age? These questions Nietzsche asked
himself. His conclusion was a complete rejection of all fixed codes of
morality, and with them of all gods, messiahs, prophets, saints, popes,
bishops, priests, and rulers.
The proper thing for a man to do, he decided, was to formulate his
own morality as he progressed from lower to higher things. He should
reject the old conceptions of good and evil and substitute for them the
human valuations, good and bad. In a word, he should put behind him
the morality invented by some dead race to make its own progress easy
and pleasant, and credited to some man-made god to give it authority,
and put in the place of this a workable personal morality based upon
his own power of distinguishing between the things which benefit him
and the things which injure him. He should (to make the idea clearer)
judge a given action solely by its effect upon his own welfare; his own
desire or will to live; and that of his children after him. All notions
of sin and virtue should be banished from his mind. He should weigh
everything in the scales of individual expedience.
Such a frank wielding of a razor-edged sword in the struggle for
existence is frowned upon by our Jewish slave-morality. We are taught
to believe that the only true happiness lies in self-effacement; that
it is wrong to profit by the misfortune or weakness of another. But
against this Nietzsche brings the undeniable answer that all life, no
matter how much we idealize it, is, at bottom, nothing more or less
than exploitation. The gain of one man is inevitably the loss of some
other man. That the emperor may die of a surfeit the peasant must die
of starvation. Among human beings, as well as among the bacilli in the
hanging drop and the lions in the jungle, there is ever in progress
this ancient struggle for existence. It is waged decently, perhaps, but
it is none the less savage and unmerciful, and the devil always takes
the hindmost.
"Life," says Nietzsche, "is essentially the appropriation, the injury,
the vanquishing of the unadapted and weak. Its object is to obtrude
its own forms and insure its own unobstructed functioning. Even an
organization whose individuals forbear in their dealings with one
another (a healthy aristocracy, for example) must, if it would live
and not die, act hostilely toward all other organizations. It must
endeavor to gain ground, to obtain advantages, to acquire ascendancy.
And this is not because it is _immoral_, but because it lives, and all
life is will to power."[5]
Nietzsche argues from this that it is absurd to put the stigma of evil
upon the mere symptoms of the great struggle. "In itself," he says,
"an act of injury, violation, exploitation or annihilation cannot be
wrong, for life operates, essentially and fundamentally, by injuring,
violating, exploiting and annihilating, and cannot even be conceived
of out of this character. One must admit, indeed, that, from the
highest biological standpoint, conditions under which the so-called
rights of others are recognized must ever be regarded as exceptional
conditions--that is to say, as partial restrictions of the instinctive
power-seeking will-to-live of the individual, made to satisfy the
more powerful will-to-live of the mass. Thus small units of power are
sacrificed to create large units of power. To regard the rights of
others as being inherent in them, and not as mere compromises for the
benefit of the mass-unit, would be to enunciate a principle hostile to
life itself."[6]
Nietzsche holds that the rights of an individual may be divided into
two classes: those things he is able to do despite the opposition of
his fellow men, and those things he is enabled to do by the grace and
permission of his fellow men. The second class of rights may be divided
again into two groups: those granted through fear and foresight, and
those granted as free gifts. But how do fear and foresight operate
to make one man concede rights to another man? It is easy enough to
discern two ways. In the first place, the grantor may fear the risks
of a combat with the grantee, and so give him what he wants without
a struggle. In the second place, the grantor, while confident of
his ability to overcome the grantee, may forbear because he sees in
the struggle a certain diminution of strength on both sides, and in
consequence, an impaired capacity for joining forces in effective
opposition to some hostile third power.
And now for the rights obtained under the second head--by bestowal and
concession. "In this case," says Nietzsche, "one man or race has enough
power, and more than enough, to be able to bestow some of it on another
man or race."[7] The king appoints one subject viceroy of a province,
and so gives him almost regal power, and makes another cup-bearer and
so gives him a perpetual right to bear the royal cup. When the power
of the grantee, through his inefficiency, decreases, the grantor
either restores it to him or takes it away from him altogether. When
the power of the grantee, on the contrary, increases, the grantor, in
alarm, commonly seeks to undermine it and encroach upon it. When the
power of the grantee remains at a level for a considerable time, his
rights become "vested" and he begins to believe that they are inherent
in him--that they constitute a gift from the gods and are beyond the
will and disposal of his fellow men. As Nietzsche points out, this last
happens comparatively seldom. More often, the grantor himself begins
to lose power and so comes into conflict with the grantee, and not
infrequently they exchange places. "National rights," says Nietzsche,
"demonstrate this fact by their constant lapse and regenesis."[8]
Nietzsche believed that a realization of all this would greatly benefit
the human race, by ridding it of some of its most costly delusions. He
held that so long as it sought to make the struggle for existence a
parlor game, with rules laid down by some blundering god--that so long
as it regarded its ideas of morality, its aspirations and its hopes
as notions implanted by the creator in the mind of Father Adam--that
so long as it insisted upon calling things by fanciful names and upon
frowning down all effort to reach the ultimate verities--that just
so long its progress would be fitful and slow. It was morality that
burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the
free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous
imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed
theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting
them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
Nietzsche called himself an immoralist. He believed that all progress
depended upon the truth and that the truth could not prevail while
men yet enmeshed themselves in a web of gratuitous and senseless laws
fashioned by their own hands. He was fond of picturing the ideal
immoralist as "a magnificent blond beast"--innocent of "virtue" and
"sin" and knowing only "good" and "bad." Instead of a god to guide
him, with commandments and the fear of hell, this immoralist would
have his own instincts and intelligence. Instead of doing a given
thing because the church called it a virtue or the current moral code
required it, he would do it because he knew that it would benefit him
or his descendants after him. Instead of refraining from a given action
because the church denounced it as a sin and the law as a crime, he
would avoid it only if he were convinced that the action itself, or its
consequences, might work him or his an injury.
Such a man, were he set down in the world today, would bear an
outward resemblance, perhaps, to the most pious and virtuous of his
fellow-citizens, but it is apparent that his life would have more of
truth in it and less of hypocrisy and cant and pretense than theirs.
He would obey the laws of the land frankly and solely because he was
afraid of incurring their penalties, and for no other reason, and he
would not try to delude his neighbors and himself into believing that
he saw anything sacred in them. He would have no need of a god to teach
him the difference between right and wrong and no need of priests to
remind him of this god's teachings. He would look upon the woes and
ills of life as inevitable and necessary results of life's conflict,
and he would make no effort to read into them the wrath of a peevish
and irrational deity at his own or his ancestors' sins. His mind would
be absolutely free of thoughts of sin and hell, and in consequence, he
would be vastly happier than the majority of persons about him. All
in all, he would be a powerful influence for truth in his community,
and as such, would occupy himself with the most noble and sublime
task possible to mere human beings: the overthrow of superstition and
unreasoning faith, with their long train of fears, horrors, doubts,
frauds, injustice and suffering.[9]
Under an ideal government--which Herbert Spencer defines as a
government in which the number of laws has reached an irreducible
minimum--such a man would prosper a great deal more than the
priest-ridden, creed-barnacled masses about him.[10] In a state wherein
communistic society, with its levelling usages and customs, had
ceased to exist, and wherein each individual of the master class was
permitted to live his life as much as possible in accordance with his
own notions of good and bad, such a man would stand forth from the herd
in proportion as his instincts were more nearly healthy and infallible
than the instincts of the herd. Ideal anarchy, in brief, would insure
the success of those men who were wisest mentally and strongest
physically, and the race would make rapid progress.
It is evident that the communistic and socialistic forms of government
at present in fashion in the world oppose such a consummation as often
as they facilitate it. Civilization, as we know it, makes more paupers
than millionaires, and more cripples than Sandows. Its most conspicuous
products, the church and the king, stand unalterably opposed to all
progress. Like the frog of the fable, which essayed to climb out of a
well, it slips back quite as often as it goes ahead.
And for these reasons Nietzsche was an anarchist--in the true meaning
of that much-bespattered word--just as Herbert Spencer and Arthur
Schopenhauer were anarchists before him.
[1] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" I.
[2] "The word _mos_, from signifying what is customary, has come to
signify what is right." Sir Wm. Markby: "Elements of Law Considered
with Reference to General Principles of Jurisprudence:" pp. 118, 5th
ed., London, 1896.
[3] In his masterly treatise, "Christian Origins," tr. by David A.
Huebsch: New York, 1906.
[4] "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" III.
[5] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_" § 259.
[6] "_Zur Genealogie der Moral_" II, § 11.
[7] "_Morgenröte,_" § 112.
[8] "_Morgenröte,_" § 112.
[9] "It is my experience," said Thomas H. Huxley, "that, aside from a
few human affections, the only thing that gives lasting and untainted
pleasure in the world, is the pursuit of truth and the destruction of
error." See "The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley," by Leonard Huxley;
London, 1900.
[10] "Read the suicide tables and see how many despairing men, hope
less of keeping their homes together, pay with their lives the toil
imposed upon them by squanderers of the public money." Helen Mathers
in _P. T. O._, Feb. 9 1907, p. 180. This is one of Tolstoi's chief
arguments against all government.
IV
THE SUPERMAN
No doubt the reader who has followed the argument in the preceding
chapters will have happened, before now, upon the thought that
Nietzsche's chain of reasoning, so far, still has a gap in it. We have
seen how he started by investigating Greek art in the light of the
Schopenhauerean philosophy, how this led him to look into morality, how
he revealed the origin of morality in transitory manifestations of the
will to power, and how he came to the conclusion that it was best for
a man to reject all ready-made moral ideas and to so order his life
that his every action would be undertaken with some notion of making
it subserve his own welfare or that of his children or children's
children. But a gap remains and it may be expressed in the question:
How is a man to define and determine his own welfare and that of the
race after him?
Here, indeed, our dionysian immoralist is confronted by a very serious
problem, and Nietzsche himself well understood its seriousness. Unless
we have in mind some definite ideal of happiness and some definite
goal of progress we had better sing the doxology and dismiss our
congregation. Christianity has such an ideal and such a goal. The one
is a Christ-like life on earth and the other is a place at the right
hand of Jehovah in the hereafter. Mohammedanism, a tinsel form of
Christianity, paints pictures of the same sort. Buddhism holds out the
tempting bait of a race set free from the thrall of earthly desires,
with an eternity of blissful nothingness.[1] The other oriental faiths
lead in the same direction and Schopenhauer, in his philosophy, laid
down the doctrine that humanity would attain perfect happiness only
when it had overcome its instinct of self-preservation--that is to
say, when it had ceased to desire to live. Even Christian Science--that
most grotesque child of credulous faith and incredible denial--offers
us the double ideal of a mortal life entirely free from mortal pain and
a harp in the heavenly band for all eternity.
What had Nietzsche to offer in place of these things? By what standard
was his immoralist to separate the good--or beneficial--things of the
world from the bad--or damaging--things? And what was the goal that the
philosopher had in mind for his immoralist? The answer to the first
question is to be found in Nietzsche's definition of the terms "good"
and "bad." "All that elevates the sense of power, the will to power,
and power itself"--this is how he defined "good." "All that proceeds
from weakness"--this is how he defined "bad." Happiness, he held, is
"the feeling that power increases--that resistance is being overcome."
"I preach not contentedness," he said, "but more power; not peace, but
war; not virtue, but efficiency. The weak and defective must go to the
wall: that is the first principle of the dionysian charity. And we must
help them to go."[2]
To put it more simply, Nietzsche offers the gospel of prudent and
intelligent selfishness, of absolute and utter individualism. "One
must learn," sang Zarathustra, "how to love oneself, with a whole and
hearty love, that one may find life with oneself endurable, and not go
gadding about. This gadding about is familiar: it is called loving
one's neighbor.'"[3] His ideal was an aristocracy which regarded the
proletariat merely as a conglomeration of draft animals made to be
driven, enslaved and exploited. "A good and healthy aristocracy,"
he said, "must acquiesce, with a good conscience, in the sacrifice
of a legion of individuals, who, for its benefit, must be reduced
to slaves and tools. The masses have no right to exist on their own
account: their sole excuse for living lies in their usefulness as a
sort of superstructure or scaffolding, upon which a more select race
of beings may be elevated."[4] Rejecting all permanent rules of good
and evil and all notions of brotherhood, Nietzsche held that the
aristocratic individualist--and it was to the aristocrat only that he
gave, unreservedly, the name of human being--must seek every possible
opportunity to increase and exalt his own sense of efficiency, of
success, of mastery, of power. Whatever tended to impair him, or to
decrease his efficiency, was bad. Whatever tended to increase it--at
no matter what cost to others--was good. There must be a complete
surrender to the law of natural selection--that invariable natural law
which ordains that the fit shall survive and the unfit shall perish.
All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and
that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of
trying to lift up the weak.
The reader may interrupt here with the question we encountered at the
start: how is the dionysian individualist to know whether a given
action will benefit him or injure him? The answer, of course, lies
in the obvious fact that, in every healthy man, instinct supplies a
very reliable guide, and that, when instinct fails or is uncertain,
experiment must solve the problem. As a general thing, nothing is more
patent than the feeling of power--the sense of efficiency, of capacity,
of mastery. Every man is constantly and unconsciously measuring himself
with his neighbors, and so becoming acutely aware of those things in
which he is their superior. Let two men clash in the stock market and
it becomes instantly apparent that one is richer, or more resourceful
or more cunning than the other. Let two men run after an omnibus and
it becomes instantly apparent that one is swifter than the other. Let
two men come together as rivals in love, war, drinking or holiness,
and one is bound to feel that he has bested the other. Such contests
are infinite in variety and in number, and all life, in fact, is made
up of them. Therefore, it is plain that every man is conscious of his
power, and aware of it when this power is successfully exerted against
some other man. In such exertions, argues Nietzsche, lies happiness,
and so his prescription for happiness consists in unrestrained
yielding to the will to power. That all men worth discussing so yield,
despite the moral demand for humility, is so plain that it scarcely
needs statement. It is the desire to attain and manifest efficiency
and superiority which makes one man explore the wilds of Africa and
another pile up vast wealth and another write books of philosophy and
another submit to pain and mutilation in the prize ring. It is this
yearning which makes men take chances and risk their lives and limbs
for glory. Everybody knows, indeed, that in the absence of such a
primordial and universal emulation the world would stand still and
the race would die. Nietzsche asks nothing more than that the fact be
openly recognized and admitted; that every man yield to the yearning
unashamed, without hypocrisy and without wasteful efforts to feed and
satisfy the yearning of other men at the expense of his own.
It is evident, of course, that the feeling of superiority has a
complement in the feeling of inferiority. Every man, in other words,
sees himself, in respect to some talent possessed in common by himself
and a rival, in one of three ways: he knows that he is superior, he
knows that he is inferior, or he is in doubt. In the first case, says
Nietzsche, the thing for him to do is to make his superiority still
greater by yielding to its stimulation: to make the gap between himself
and his rival wider and wider. In the second case, the thing for him to
do is to try to make the gap smaller: to lift himself up or to pull his
rival down until they are equal or the old disproportion is reversed.
In the third case, it is his duty to plunge into a contest and risk
his all upon the cast of the die. "I do not exhort you to peace,"
says Zarathustra, "but to victory!"[5] If victory comes not, let it
be defeat, death and annihilation--but, in any event, let there be a
fair fight. Without this constant strife--this constant testing--this
constant elimination of the unfit--there can be no progress. "As
the smaller surrenders himself to the greater, so the greater must
surrender himself to the will to power and stake life upon the issue.
It is the mission of the greatest to run risk and danger--to cast dice
with death."[6] Power, in a word, is never infinite: it is always
becoming.
Practically and in plain language, what does all this mean? Simply that
Nietzsche preaches a mighty crusade against all those ethical ideas
which teach a man to sacrifice himself for the theoretical good of his
inferiors. A culture which tends to equalize, he says, is necessarily
a culture which tends to rob the strong and so drag them down, for the
strong cannot give of their strength to the weak without decreasing
their store. There must be an unending effort to widen the gap; there
must be a constant search for advantage, an infinite alertness. The
strong man must rid himself of all idea that it is disgraceful to yield
to his acute and ever present yearning for still more strength. There
must be an abandonment of the old slave-morality and a transvaluation
of moral values. The will to power must be emancipated from the bonds
of that system of ethics which brands it with infamy, and so makes the
one all-powerful instinct of every sentient creature loathsome and
abominable.
It is only the under-dog, he says, that believes in equality. It
is only the groveling and inefficient mob that seeks to reduce all
humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain
by such leveling. "'There are no higher men,' says the crowd in the
market place. 'We are all equal; man is man; in the presence of God
we are all equal!' In the presence of God, indeed! But I tell you
that God is dead!" So thunders Zarathustra.[7] That is to say, our
idea of brotherhood is part of the mob-morality of the ancient Jews,
who evolved it out of their own helplessness and credited it to their
god. We have inherited their morality with their god and so we find
it difficult--in the mass--to rid ourselves of their point of view.
Nietzsche himself rejected utterly the Judaic god and he believed that
the great majority of intelligent men of his time were of his mind.
That he was not far wrong in this assumption is evident to everyone.
At the present time, indeed, it is next to impossible to find a sane
man in all the world who believes in the actual existence of the
deity described in the old testament. All theology is now an effort
to explain away this god. Therefore, argues Nietzsche, it is useless
to profess an insincere concurrence in a theistic idea at which our
common sense revolts, and ridiculous to maintain the inviolability of
an ethical scheme grounded upon this idea.