of brotherhood still fives, and that, as a matter of fact, it is an
idea inherent in the nature of man, and one that owes nothing to the
rejected supernaturalism which once fortified and enforced it. That
is to say, it may be argued that the impulse to self-sacrifice and
mutual help is itself an instinct. The answer to this lies in the very
patent fact that it is not. Nothing, indeed, is more apparent than the
essential selfishness of man. In so far as they are able to defy or
evade the moral code without shame or damage, the strong always exploit
the weak. The rich man puts up the price of the necessities of life
and so makes himself richer and the poor poorer. The emperor combats
democracy. The political boss opposes the will of the people for his
own advantage. The inventor patents his inventions and so increases
his relative superiority to the common run of men. The ecclesiastic
leaves a small parish for a larger one--because the pay is better
or "the field offers wider opportunities," _i.e._ gives him a better
chance to "save souls" and so increases his feeling of efficiency. The
philanthropist gives away millions because the giving visualizes and
makes evident to all men his virtue and power. It is ever the same
in this weary old world: every slave would be a master if he could.
Therefore, why deny it? Why make it a crime to do what every man's
instincts prompt him to do? Why call it a sin to do what every man
does, insofar as he can? The man who throws away his money or cripples
himself with drink, or turns away from his opportunities--we call him a
lunatic or a fool. And yet, wherein does he differ from the ideal holy
man of our slave-morality--the holy man who tortures himself, neglects
his body, starves his mind and reduces himself to parasitism, that the
weak, the useless and unfit may have, through his ministrations, some
measure of ease? Such is the argument of the dionysian philosophy. It
is an argument for the actual facts of existence--however unrighteous
and ugly those facts may be.
That the lifting up of the weak, in the long run, is an unprofitable
and useless business is evident on very brief reflection. Philanthropy,
considered largely, is inevitably a failure. Now and then we may
transform an individual pauper or drunkard into a useful, producing
citizen, but this happens very seldom. Nothing is more patent, indeed,
than the fact that charity merely converts the unfit--who, in the
course of nature, would soon die out and so cease to encumber the
earth--into parasites--who live on indefinitely, a nuisance and a
burden to their betters. The "reformed" drunkard always goes back to
his cups: drunkardness, as every physician knows, is as essentially
incurable as congenital insanity. And it is the same with poverty.
We may help a pauper to survive by giving him food and drink, but we
cannot thereby make an efficient man of him--we cannot rid him of the
unfitness which made him a pauper. There are, of course, exceptions
to this, as to other rules, but the validity of the rule itself will
not be questioned by any observant man. It goes unquestioned, indeed,
by those who preach the doctrine of charity the loudest. They know
it would be absurd to argue that helping the unfit is profitable to
the race, and so they fall back, soon or late, upon the argument that
charity is ordained of God and that the impulse to it is implanted
in every decent man. Nietzsche flatly denies this. Charity, he says,
is a man-made idea, with which the gods have nothing to do. Its sole
effect is to maintain the useless at the expense of the strong. In the
mass, the helped can never hope to discharge in full their debt to the
helpers. The result upon the race is thus retrogression.
And now for our second question. What was the goal Nietzsche had in
mind for his immoralist? What was to be the final outcome of his
overturning of all morality? Did he believe the human race would
progress until men became gods and controlled the sun and stars as they
now control the flow of great rivers? Or did he believe that the end
of it all would be annihilation? After the publication of Nietzsche's
earlier books, with their ruthless tearing down of the old morality,
these questions were asked by critics innumerable in all the countries
of Europe. The philosopher was laughed at as a crazy iconoclast who
destroyed without rebuilding. He was called a visionary and a lunatic,
and it was reported and believed that he had no answer: that his
philosophy was doomed to bear itself to the earth, like an arch without
a keystone. But in April, 1883, he began the publication of "_Also
sprach Zarathustra_" and therein his reply was written large.
"I teach you," cries Zarathustra, "the superman! Man is something that
shall be surpassed. What, to man, is the ape? A joke or a shame. Man
shall be the same to the superman: a joke or shame.... Man is a bridge
connecting ape and superman.... The superman will be the final flower
and ultimate expression of the earth. I conjure you to be faithful to
the earth ... to cease looking beyond the stars for your hopes and
rewards. You must sacrifice yourself to the earth that one day it may
bring forth the superman."[8]
Here we hearken unto the materialist, the empiricist, the monist _par
excellence._ And herein we perceive dimly the outlines of the superman.
He will be rid of all delusions that hamper and oppress the will to
power. He will be perfect in body and perfect in mind. He will know
everything worth knowing and have strength and skill and cunning to
defend himself against any conceivable foe. Because the prospect of
victory will feed his will to power he will delight in combat, and
his increasing capacity for combat will decrease his sensitiveness
to pain. Conscious of his efficiency, he will be happy; having no
illusions regarding a heaven and a hell, he will be content. He will
see life as something pleasant--something to be faced gladly and with
a laugh. He will say "yes" alike to its pleasures and to its ills. Rid
of the notion that there is anything filthy in living--that the flesh
is abominable[9] and life an affliction[10]--he will grow better and
better fitted to meet the conditions of actual existence. He will be
scornful, merciless and supremely fit. He will be set free from man's
fear of gods and of laws, just as man has been set free from the ape's
fear of lions and of open places.
To put it simply, the superman's thesis will be this: that he has been
put into the world without his consent, that he must live in the world,
that he owes nothing to the other people there, and that he knows
nothing whatever of existence beyond the grave. Therefore, it will be
his effort to attain the highest possible measure of satisfaction for
the only unmistakable and genuinely healthy instinct within him: the
yearning to live--to attain power--to meet and overcome the influences
which would weaken or destroy him. "Keep yourselves up, my brethren,"
cautions Zarathustra, "learn to keep yourselves up! The sea is stormy
and many seek to keep afloat by your aid. The sea is stormy and all are
overboard. Well, cheer up and save yourselves, ye old seamen!... What
is your fatherland? The land wherein your children will dwell.... Thus
does your love to these remote ones speak: 'Disregard your neighbors!
Man is something to be surpassed!' Surpass yourself at the expense
of your neighbor. What you cannot seize, let no man _give_ you....
Let him who can command, obey!"[11] The idea, by this time, should be
plain. The superman, in the struggle for existence, asks and gives
no quarter. He believes that it is the destiny of sentient beings to
progress upward, and he is willing to sacrifice himself that his race
may do so. But his sacrifice must benefit, not his neighbor--not the
man who should and must look out for himself--but the generations yet
unborn.
It must be borne in mind that the superman will make a broad
distinction between instinct and passion--that he will not mistake the
complex thing we call love, with its costly and constant hurricanes of
emotion, for the instinct of reproduction--that he will not mistake
mere anger for war--that he will not mistake patriotism, with all its
absurdities and illusions, for the homing instinct. The superman, in
brief, will know how to renounce as well as how to possess, but his
renunciation will be the child, not of faith or of charity, but of
expediency. "Will nothing beyond your capacity," says Zarathustra.
"Demand nothing of yourself that is beyond achievement!... The higher
a thing is, the less often does it succeed. Be of good cheer! What
matter! Learn to laugh at yourselves!... Suppose you have failed? Has
not the future gained by your failure?"[12] The superman, as Nietzsche
was fond of putting it, must play at dice with death. He must have
ever in mind no other goal but the good of the generations after him.
He must be willing to battle with his fellows, as with illusions, that
those who came after may not be afflicted by these enemies. He must be
supremely unmoral and unscrupulous. His must be the gospel of eternal
defiance.
Nietzsche, it will be observed, was unable to give any very definite
picture of this proud, heaven-kissing superman. It is only in
Zarathustra's preachments to "the higher man," a sort of bridge between
man and superman, that we may discern the philosophy of the latter. On
one occasion Nietzsche penned a passage which seemed to compare the
superman to "the great blond beasts" which ranged Europe in the days
of the mammoth, and from this fact many commentators have drawn the
conclusion that he had in mind a mere two-legged brute, with none of
the higher traits that we now speak of as distinctly human. But, as a
matter of fact, he harbored no such idea. In another place, wherein he
speaks of three metamorphoses of the race, under the allegorical names
of the camel, the lion and the child, he makes this plain. The camel,
a hopeless beast of burden, is man. But when the camel goes into the
solitary desert, it throws off its burden and becomes a lion. That is
to say, the heavy and hampering load of artificial dead-weight called
morality is cast aside and the instinct to live--or, as Nietzsche
insists upon regarding it, the will to power--is given free rein.
The lion is the "higher man"--the intermediate stage between man and
superman. The latter appears neither as camel nor lion, but as a little
child. He knows a little child's peace. He has a little child's calm.
Like a babe _in utero_ he is ideally adapted to his environment.
Zarathustra sees man "like a camel kneeling down to be heavy laden."
What are his burdens? One is "to humiliate oneself." Another is
"to love those who despise us." In the desert comes the first
metamorphosis, and the "thou shalt" of the camel becomes the "I will"
of the lion. And what is the mission of the lion? "To create for
itself freedom for new creating." After the lion comes the child. It
is "innocence and oblivion, a new starting, a play, a wheel rolling by
itself, a prime motor, a holy asserting." The thought here is cast in
the heightened language of mystic poetry, but its meaning, I take it,
is not lost.[13]
Nietzsche, even more than Schopenhauer, recognized the fact that great
mental progress--in the sense that mental progress means an increased
capacity for grappling with the conditions of existence--necessarily
has to depend upon physical efficiency. In exceptional cases a great
mind may inhabit a diseased body, but it is obvious that this is not
the rule. A nation in which the average man had but one hand and the
duration of life was but 20 years could not hope to cope with even the
weakest nation of modern Europe. So it is plain that the first step in
the improvement of the race must be the improvement of the body. Jesus
Christ gave expression to this need by healing the sick, and the chief
end and aim of all modern science is that of making life more and more
bearable. Every labor-saving machine ever invented by man has no other
purpose than that of saving bodily wear and tear. Every religion aims
to rescue man from the racking fear of hell and the strain of trying
to solve the great problems of existence for himself. Every scheme of
government that we know is, at bottom, a mere device for protecting
human beings from injury and death.
Thus it will be seen that Nietzsche's program of progress does not
differ from other programs quite so much as, at first sight, it may
seem to do. He laid down the principle that, before anything else could
be accomplished, we must have first looked to the human machine. As
we have seen, the intellect is a mere symptom of the will to live.
Therefore whatever removes obstacles to the free exercise of this will
to live, necessarily promotes and increases intelligence. A race that
was never incapacitated by illness would be better fitted than any
other race for any conceivable intellectual pursuit: from making money
to conjugating Greek verbs. Nietzsche merely states this obvious fact
in an unaccustomed form.
His superman is to give his will to live--or will to power, as you
please--perfect freedom. As a result, those individuals in whom this
instinct most accurately meets the conditions of life on earth will
survive, and in their offspring, by natural laws, the instinct itself
will become more and more accurate. That is to say, there will appear
in future generations individuals in whom this instinct will tend more
and more to order the performance of acts of positive benefit and to
forbid the performance of acts likely to result in injury. This injury,
it is plain, may take the form of unsatisfied wants as well as of
broken skulls. Therefore, the man--or superman--in whom the instinct
reaches perfection will unconsciously steer clear of all the things
which harass and batter mankind today--exhausting self-denials as well
as exhausting passions. Whatever seems likely to benefit him, he will
do; whatever seems likely to injure him he will avoid. When he is in
doubt, he will dare--and accept defeat or victory with equal calm.
His attitude, in brief, will be that of a being who faces life as he
finds it, defiantly and unafraid--who knows how to fight and how to
forbear--who sees things as they actually are, and not as they might or
should be, and so wastes no energy yearning for the moon or in butting
his head against stone walls. "This new table, O my brethren, I put
over you: _Be hard!_"[14]
Such was the goal that Nietzsche held before the human race. Other
philosophers before him had attempted the same thing. Schopenhauer had
put forward his idea of a race that had found happiness in putting
away its desire to live. Comte had seen a vision of a race whose every
member sought the good of all. The humanitarians of all countries
had drawn pictures of Utopias peopled by beings who had outgrown all
human instincts--who had outgrown the _one_ fundamental, unquenchable
and eternal instinct of every living thing: the desire to conquer, to
live, to remain alive. Nietzsche cast out all these fine ideals as
essentially impossible. Man was of the earth, earthy, and his heavens
and hells were creatures of his own vaporings. Only after he had ceased
dreaming of them and thrown off his crushing burden of transcendental
morality--only thus and then could he hope to rise out of the slough of
despond in which he wallowed.
[1] "Nirvana is a cessation of striving for individual existence"--that
is, after death. See "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology," vol.
II, pp. 178; New York, 1902.
[2] "Der Antichrist," § 2.
[3] "_Also sprach Zarathustra,_" III.
[4] "_Jenseits von Gut und Böse,_" § 258.
[5] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.
[6] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," II.
[7] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," IV.
[8] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.
[9] Galatians V, 19, 20, 21.
[10] Job V, 7; XIV, 1; Ecclesiastes I, 1.
[11] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.
[12] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," IV.
[13] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," I.
[14] "_Also sprach Zarathustra_," III.
V
ETERNAL RECURRENCE
In the superman Nietzsche showed the world a conceivable and possible
goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it
was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will
there be another super-superman to follow and a super-supersuperman
after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the
universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline
come after, with a return down the long line, through the superman to
man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to
the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether and
empty space?
Nietzsche answered these questions by offering the theory that the
universe moves in regular cycles and that all which is now happening
on earth, and in all the stars, to the uttermost, will be repeated,
again and again, throughout eternity. In other words, he dreamed of a
cosmic year, corresponding, in some fashion, to the terrestrial year.
Man, who has sprung from the elements, will rise into superman, and
perhaps infinitely beyond, and then, in the end, by catastrophe or slow
decline, he will be resolved into the primary elements again, and the
whole process will begin anew.
This notion, it must be admitted, was not original with Nietzsche and
it would have been better for his philosophy and for his repute as an
intelligent thinker had he never sought to elucidate it. In his early
essay on history he first mentioned it and there he credited it to its
probable inventors--the Pythagoreans.[1] It was their belief that,
whenever the heavenly bodies all returned to certain fixed relative
positions, the whole history of the universe began anew. The idea
seemed to fascinate Nietzsche, in whom, despite his worship of the
actual, there was an ever-evident strain of mysticism, and he referred
to it often in his later books. The pure horror of it--of the notion
that all the world's suffering would have to be repeated again and
again, that men would have to die over and over again for all infinity,
that there was no stopping place or final goal--the horror of all this
appealed powerfully to his imagination. Frau Andreas-Salomé tells us
that he "spoke of it only in a low voice and with every sign of the
profoundest emotion" and there is reason to believe that, at one time,
he thought there might be some confirmation of it in the atomic theory,
and that his desire to go to Vienna to study the natural sciences
was prompted by a wish to investigate this notion. Finally he became
convinced that there was no ground for such a belief in any of the
known facts of science, and after that, we are told, his shuddering
horror left him.
It was then possible for him to deal with the doctrine of eternal
recurrence as a mere philosophical speculation, without the
uncomfortable reality of a demonstrated scientific fact, and thereafter
he spent much time considering it. In "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" he
puts it into the brain of his prophet-hero, and shows how it well-nigh
drove the latter mad.
"I will come back," muses Zarathustra, "with this sun, with this earth,
with this eagle, with this serpent--_not_ for a new life or a better
life, but to the same life I am now leading. I will come back unto this
same old life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, in order to
teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things."[2]
In the end, Nietzsche turned this fantastic idea into a device for
exalting his superman. The superman is one who realizes that all of
his struggles will be in vain, and that, in future cycles, he will
have to go through them over and over again. Yet he has attained such
a superhuman immunity to all emotion--to all ideas of pleasure and
pain--that the prospect does not daunt him. Despite its horror, he
faces it unafraid. It is all a part of life, and in consequence it is
good. He has learned to agree to everything that exists--even to the
ghastly necessity for living again and again. In a word, he does not
fear an endless series of lives, because life, to him, has lost all the
terrors which a merely human man sees in it.
"Let us not only endure the inevitable," says Nietzsche, "and still
less hide it from ourselves: _let us love it!_"
As Vernon Lee (Miss Violet Paget)[3] has pointed out, this idea is
scarcely to be distinguished from the fundamental tenet of stoicism.
Miss Paget also says that it bears a close family resemblance to that
denial of pain which forms the basis of Christian Science, but this is
not true, for a vast difference exists between a mere denial of pain
and a willingness to admit it, face it, and triumph over it. But the
notion appears, in endless guises, in many philosophies and Goethe
voiced it, after a fashion, in his maxim, "_Entbehren sollst du_" ("Man
must do without"). The idea of eternal recurrence gives point, again,
to a familiar anecdote. This concerns a joker who goes to an inn, eats
his fill and then says to the innkeeper: "You and I will be here again
in a million years: let me pay you then." "Very well," replies the
quick-witted innkeeper, "but first pay me for the beefsteak you ate the
last time you were here--a million years ago."
Despite Nietzsche's conclusion that the known facts of existence do
not bear it out, and the essential impossibility of discussing it to
profit, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is by no means unthinkable.
The celestial cycle put forward, as an hypothesis, by modern
astronomy--the progression, that is, from gas to molten fluid, from
fluid to solid, and from solid, by catastrophe, back to gas again--is
easily conceivable, and it is easily conceivable, too, that the earth,
which has passed through an uninhabitable state into a habitable state,
may one day become uninhabitable again, and so keep seesawing back and
forth through all eternity.
But what will be the effect of eternal recurrence upon the superman?
The tragedy of it, as we have seen, will merely serve to make him
heroic. He will defy the universe and say "yes" to life. Putting aside
all thought of conscious existence beyond the grave, he will seek to
live as nearly as possible in exact accordance with those laws laid
down for the evolution of sentient beings on earth when the cosmos was
first set spinning. But how will he know when he has attained this
end? How will he avoid going mad with doubts about his own knowledge?
Nietzsche gave much thought, first and last, to this epistemological
problem, and at different times he leaned toward different schools,
but his writing, taken as a whole, indicates that the fruit of his
meditations was a thorough-going empiricism. The superman, indeed, is
an empiricist who differs from Bacon only in the infinitely greater
range of his observation and experiment. He learns by bitter experience
and he generalizes from this knowledge. An utter and unquestioning
materialist, he knows nothing of mind except as a function of body.
To him speculation seems vain and foolish: his concern is ever with
imminent affairs. That is to say, he believes a thing to be true when
his eyes, his ears, his nose and his hands tell him it is true. And in
this he will be at one with all those men who are admittedly above the
mass today. Reject empiricism and you reject at one stroke, the whole
sum of human knowledge.
When a man stubs his toe, for example, the facts that the injured
member swells and that it hurts most frightfully appear to him as
absolute certainties. If we deny that he actually knows these things
and maintain that the spectacle of the swelling and the sensation of
pain are mere creatures of his mind, we cast adrift from all order and
common-sense in the universe and go sailing upon a stormy sea of crazy
metaphysics and senseless contradictions. There are many things that
we do not know, and in the nature of things, never can know. We do not
know _why_ phosphorus has a tendency to combine with oxygen, but the
fact that it _has_ we _do_ know--and if we try to deny we _do_ know it,
we must deny that we are sentient beings, and in consequence, must
regard life and the universe as mere illusions. No man with a sound
mind makes any such denial. The things about us are real, just as our
feeling that we are alive is real.[4]