thinking. Scarcely less was the influence of that great revolution in
man's view of man, that genuine "transvaluation of all values," set in
motion by the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species,"
in 1859. In the chapter on Christianity I have sketched briefly the
part that Nietzsche played in the matter, and have shown how it rested
squarely upon the parts played by those who went before him. He himself
was fond of attacking Darwin, whom he disliked as he disliked all
Englishmen, and of denying that he had gotten anything of value out
of Darwin's work, but it is not well to take such denunciations and
denials too seriously. Like Ibsen, Nietzsche was often an unreliable
witness as to his own intellectual obligations. So long as he dealt
with ideas his thinking was frank and clear, but when he turned to the
human beings behind them, and particularly when he discussed those who
had presumed to approach the problems he undertook to solve himself,
his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and
his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined
to make his statements dubious, and sometimes even absurd. Thus with
his sneers at Darwin and the other evolutionists, especially Spencer.
If he did not actually follow them, then he at least walked side by
side with them, and every time they cleared another bit of the path he
profited by it too. One thing, at all events, they gave to the world
that entered into Nietzsche's final philosophy, and without which it
would have stopped short of its ultimate development, and that was the
conception of man as a mammal. Their great service to human knowledge
was precisely this. They found man a loiterer at the gates of heaven, a
courtier in the ante-chambers of gods. They brought him back to earth
and bade him help himself.
Meanwhile, the reader who cares to go into the matter further will
find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. He
himself has testified to his debt to Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), that
great apologist for Napoleon Bonaparte and exponent of the Napoleonic
philosophy. "Stendhal," he says, "was one of the happiest accidents of
my life.... He is quite priceless, with his penetrating psychologist's
eye and his grip upon facts, recalling that of the greatest of all
masters of facts (_ex ungue Napoleon_--); and last, but not least,
as an _honest_ atheist--one of a species rare and hard to find in
France.... Maybe I myself am jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the
best of atheistic jokes, that I might best have made: 'the only excuse
for God is that He doesn't exist.'"[9] Of his debt to Max Stirner the
evidence is less clear, but it has been frequently alleged, and, as
Dr. Mügge says, "quite a literature has grown up around the question."
Stirner's chief work, "_Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_,"[10] was first
published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong
plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and
even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche. Dr. Mügge quotes a
few of them: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule,
and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me....
Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate
of the struggle--master or slave!... Egoism, not love, must decide."
Others will greet the reader of Stirner's book: "As long as you believe
in the truth, you do not believe in yourself; you are a servant, a
religious man. You alone are the truth.... Whether what I think and do
is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane,
whether unhuman, illiberal, unhumane, what do I ask about that? If
only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then
overlay it with predicates if you will: it is all one to me...." But,
as Dr. J. L. Walker well says, in his introduction to Mr. Byington's
English translation, there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and
Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for
all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher
castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche
actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter
unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.
The other attempts to convict him of appropriating ideas come to little
more. Dr. Mügge, for example, quotes these pre-Nietzschean passages
from Heracleitus: "War is universal and right, and by strife all things
arise and are made use of ... Good and evil are the same.... To me,
one is worth ten thousand, if he be the best." And Mr. More quotes
this from Hobbes: "In the first place, I put forth, for a general
inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power
after power, that ceaseth only with death"--to which the reader may
add, "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that
is it which he for his part calleth good ... for these words of good,
evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that
useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any
common rule of good and evil, to be taken for the nature of objects
themselves."[11] But all these passages prove no more than that men of
past ages saw the mutability of criteria, and their origin in human
aspiration and striving. Not only Heracleitus, but many other Greeks,
voiced that ethical scepticism. It was for many years, indeed, one of
the dominant influences in Greek philosophy, and so, if Nietzsche
is accused of borrowing it, that is no more than saying what I have
already said: that he ate Greek grapes in his youth and became, to all
intellectual intents and purposes, a Greek himself. A man must needs
have a point of view, a manner of approach to life, and that point of
view is no less authentic when he reaches it through his reading and by
the exercise of a certain degree of free choice than when he accepts
it unthinkingly from the folk about him. The service of Heracleitus
and the other Greeks to Nietzsche was not that they gave him his
philosophy, but that they made him a philosopher. It was the questions
they asked rather than the answers they made that interested and
stimulated him, and if, at times, he answered much as they had done,
that was only proof of his genuine kinship with them.
On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most
influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual
figure of modern Germany, the common _stammvater_ of all the warring
schools of today--in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and
great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises
of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years.
His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause,
professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the
town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into
contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the
Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that
"Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so
it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's
Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.[12] Thirty years
afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar,
and his vastly greater debt to Goethe--"a thorough-going realist in
the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but
entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself....
What he sought was _totality_."[13]
Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and
tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People
will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest
artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best
any mere German[14] could do an incalculable distance behind us."[15]
Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South
German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in
free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the
year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl
Joel,[16] Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche,
through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the
truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics
at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly,
nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its
sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism,
than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from
the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard
for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to
the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they
certainly did not teach him what to write.
Even so, it is probable that he was as much influenced by certain
Frenchmen as he ever was by Germans--particularly by Montaigne, La
Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort, his
constant companions on his wanderings. He borrowed from them, not only
the somewhat obvious device of putting his argument into the form of
apothegms and epigrams, but also their conception of the dialectic as
one of the fine arts--in other words, their striving after style. "It
is to a small number of French authors," he once said, "that I return
again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard all that
is called culture elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, as mere
misunderstanding.... The few persons of higher culture that I have met
in Germany have had French training--above all, Frau Cosima Wagner,
by long odds the best authority on questions of taste I ever heard
of."[17] This preference carried him so far, indeed, that he usually
wrote more like a Frenchman than like a German, toying with words,
experimenting with their combinations, matching them as carefully as
pearls for a necklace. "Nietzsche," says one critic,[18] "whether for
good or evil, introduced Romance (not romantic!) qualities of terseness
and clearness into German prose; it was his endeavor to free it from
those elements which he described as _deutsch und schwer_." (German and
heavy.)
For the rest, he denounced Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing and
Schiller, the remaining gods in Germany's literary valhalla, even more
bitterly than he denounced Kant and Hegel, the giants of orthodox
German philosophy.
[1] "The Revival of Aristocracy," London, 1906, pp. 14-59.
[2] "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," New York, 1909, pp.
315-320.
[3] "_Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme_," Paris, 1902, p. 294.
[4] "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," London, 1901,
pp. xi-xxiii.
[5] "_Von Darwin bis Nietzsche_," Leipsic, 1895.
[6] "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912, pp. 18-45.
[7] "_De Kant à Nietzsche,_" Paris, 1900.
[8] Nietzsche himself, in after years, viewed this attack humorously,
and was wont to say that it was caused, not by Schopenhauer alone, but
also (and chiefly) by the bad cooking of Leipsic. See "_Ecce Homo_,"
II, i.
[9] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.
[10] Eng. tr. by Steven T. Byington, "The Ego and His Own," New York,
1907.
[11] The Leviathan, I, vi; London, 1651.
[12] Frau Förster-Nietzsche: "The Life of Nietzsche" (Eng. tr.), Vol.
I, p. 31.
[13] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, 49.
[14] Heine was a Jew--and Nietzsche, as we know, liked to think himself
a Pole.
[15] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 4.
[16] "_Nietzsche und die Romantik_," Jena, 1905.
[17] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.
[18] J. G. Robertson: "A History of German Literature," Edinburgh,
1902, pp. 611-615.
II
NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS
Let us set aside at the start that great host of critics whose chief
objection to Nietzsche is that he is blasphemous, that his philosophy
and his manner outrage the piety and prudery of the world. Of such
sort are the pale parsons who arise in suburban pulpits to dispose of
him in the half hour between the first and second lessons, as their
predecessors of the 70's and 80's disposed of Darwin, Huxley and
Spencer. Let them read their indictments and bring in their verdicts
and pronounce their bitter sentences! The student of Nietzsche must
perceive at once the irrelevance of that sort of criticism. It was the
deliberate effort of the philosopher, from the very start of what he
calls his tunnelling period, to provoke and deserve the accusation of
sacrilege. In framing his accusations against Christian morality he
tried to make them, not only persuasive and just, but also as offensive
as possible. No man ever had more belief in the propagandist value of a
_succès de scandale._ He tried his best to shock the guardians of the
sacred vessels, to force upon them the burdens of an active defense,
to bring them out into the open, to attract attention to the combat by
accentuating its mere fuming and fury. If he succeeded in the effort,
if he really outraged Christendom, then it is certainly absurd to bring
forward that deliberate achievement as an exhibit against itself.
The more pertinent and plausible criticisms of Nietzsche, launched
against him in Europe and America by many industrious foes, may be
reduced for convenience to five fundamental propositions, to wit:
(_a_) He was a decadent and a lunatic, and in consequence his
philosophy is not worthy of attention.
(_b_) His writings are chaotic and contradictory and it is impossible
to find in them any connected philosophical system.
(_c_) His argument that self-sacrifice costs more than it yields, and
that it thus reduces the average fitness of a race practising it, is
contradicted by human experience.
(_d_) The scheme of things proposed by him is opposed by ideas inherent
in all civilized men.
(_e_) Even admitting that his criticism of Christian morality is
well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would work as well.
It is scarcely worth while to linger over the first and second of
these propositions. The first has been defended most speciously by Max
Nordau, in "Degeneration," a book which made as much noise, when it was
first published in 1893, as any of Nietzsche's own. Nordau's argument
is based upon a theory of degeneration borrowed quite frankly from
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian quasi-scientist whose modest contributions
to psychiatry were offset by many volumes of rubbish about spooks,
table-tapping, mental telepathy, spirit photography and the alleged
stigmata of criminals and men of genius. Degeneracy and decadence
were terms that filled the public imagination in the 80's and 90's,
and even Nietzsche himself seemed to think, at times, that they had
definite meanings and that his own type of mind was degenerate. As
Nordau defines degeneracy it is "a morbid deviation from the original
type"--_i.e._ from the physical and mental norm of the species--and
he lays stress upon the fact that by "morbid" he means "infirm" or
"incapable of fulfilling normal functions." But straightway he begins
to regard _any_ deviation as morbid and degenerate, despite the obvious
fact that it may be quite the reverse. He says, for example, that a man
with web toes is a degenerate, and then proceeds to argue elaborately
from that premise, entirely overlooking the fact that web toes, under
easily imaginable circumstances, might be an advantage instead of a
handicap, and that, under the ordinary conditions of life, we are
unable to determine with any accuracy whether they are the one thing
or the other. So with the symptoms of degeneracy that he discovers in
Nietzsche. He shows that Nietzsche differed vastly from the average,
every-day German of his time, and even from the average German of
superior culture--that he thought differently, wrote differently,
admired different heroes and believed in different gods--but he by no
means proves thereby that Nietzsche's processes of thought were morbid
or infirm, or that the conclusions he reached were invalid _a priori._
Since Nordau startled the world with his book, the Lombrosan theory of
degeneracy has lost ground among psychologists and pathologists, but it
is still launched against Nietzsche by an occasional critic, and so it
deserves to be noticed.
Nordau's discussion of Nietzsche's insanity is rather more intelligent
than his discussion of the philosopher's alleged degeneracy, if only
because his facts are less open to dispute, but here, too, he forgets
that the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the
man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of
a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the
pudding itself is good. Nordau, in attempting to dispose of Nietzsche's
philosophy on the ground that the author died a madman, succeeds only
in piling up a mass of uncontroverted but irrelevant accusations. He
shows that Nietzsche was an utter believer in his own wisdom, that he
had a fondness for repeating certain favorite arguments _ad nauseam_,
that he was violently impatient of criticism, that he chronically
underestimated the man opposed to him, that he sometimes indulged in
blasphemy for the sheer joy of shocking folks, and that he was often
hypnotized by the exuberance of his own verbosity, but it must be plain
that this indictment has its effective answer in the fact that it might
be found with equal justice against almost any revolutionary enthusiast
one selected at random--for example, Savonarola, Tolstoi, Luther,
Ibsen, Garrison, Phillips, Wilkes, Bakúnin, Marx, or Nordau himself.
That Nietzsche died insane is undoubted, and that his insanity was not
sudden in its onset is also plain, and one may even admit frankly that
it is visible, here and there, in his writings, particularly those of
his last year or two; but that his principal doctrines, the ideas upon
which his fame are based, are the fantasies of a maniac is certainly
wholly false. Had he sought to prove that cows had wings, it might be
fair today to dismiss him as Nordau attempts to dismiss him. But when
he essayed to prove that Christianity impeded progress, he laid down a
proposition that, whatever its novelty and daring, was obviously not
irrational, and neither was there anything irrational in the reasoning
whereby he supported it. One need go no further for proof of this than
the fact that multitudes of sane men, while he lived and since his
death, have debated that proposition in all seriousness and found a
plentiful food for sober thought in Nietzsche's statement and defense
of it. Ibsen also passed out of life in mental darkness, and so did
Schumann, but no reasonable critic would seek thereby to deny all
intelligibility to "Peer Gynt" or to the piano quintet in E flat.
Again, it is Nordau who chiefly voices the second of the objections
noted at the beginning of this chapter, though here many another
self-confessed serpent of wisdom follows him. Nietzsche, he says,
tore down without building up, and died without having formulated any
workable substitute for the Christian morality he denounced. Even to
the reader who has got no further into Nietzsche than the preceding
chapters of this book, the absurdity of such a charge must be manifest
without argument. No man, indeed, ever left a more comprehensive
system of ethics, not even Comte or Herbert Spencer, and if it be true
that he scattered it through a dozen books and that he occasionally
modified it in some of its details, it is equally true that his
fundamental principles were always stated with perfect clearness and
that they remained substantially unchanged from first to last. But
even supposing that he had died before he had arranged his ideas in a
connected and coherent form, and that it had remained for his disciples
to deduce and group his final conclusions, and to rid the whole of
inconsistency--even then it would have been possible to study those
conclusions seriously and to accept them for what they were worth.
Nordau lays it down as an axiom that a man cannot be a reformer unless
he proposes some ready-made and perfectly symmetrical scheme of things
to take the place of the notions he seeks to overturn, that if he does
not do this he is a mere hurler of bricks and shouter of blasphemies.
But all of us know that this is not true. Nearly every considerable
reform the world knows has been accomplished, not by one man, but by
many men working in series. It seldom happens, indeed, that the man who
first points out the necessity for change lives long enough to see that
change accomplished, or even to define its precise manner and terms.
Nietzsche himself was not the first critic of Christian morality,
nor did he so far dispose of the question that he left no room for
successors. But he made a larger contribution to it than any man had
ever made before him, and the ideas he contributed were so acute and so
convincing that they must needs be taken into account by every critic
who comes after him.
So much for the first two arguments against the prophet of the
superman. Both raise immaterial objections and the second makes an
allegation that is grotesquely untrue. The other three are founded upon
sounder logic, and, when maintained skillfully, afford more reasonable
ground for objecting to the Nietzschean system, either as a whole or in
part. It would be interesting, perhaps, to attempt a complete review
of the literature embodying them, but that would take a great deal
more space than is here available, and so we must be content with a
glance at a few typical efforts at refutation. One of the most familiar
of these appears in the argument that the messianic obligation of
self-sacrifice, whatever its cost, has yet yielded the race a large
profit--that we are the better for our Christian charity and that
we owe it entirely to Christianity. This argument has been best put
forward, perhaps, by Bennett Hume, an Englishman. If it were not for
Christian charity, says Mr. Hume, there would be no hospitals and
asylums for the sick and insane, and in consequence, no concerted and
effective effort to make man more healthy and efficient. Therefore, he
maintains, it must be admitted that the influence of Christianity, as a
moral system, has been for the good of the race. But this argument, in
inspection, quickly goes to pieces, and for two reasons. In the first
place, it must be obvious that the advantages of preserving the unfit,
few of whom ever become wholly fit again, are more than dubious; and
in the second place, it must be plain that modern humanitarianism, in
so far as it is scientific and unsentimental and hence profitable, is
so little a purely Christian idea that the Christian church, even down
to our own time, has actually opposed it. No man, indeed, can read Dr.
Andrew D. White's great history of the warfare between science and
the church without carrying away the conviction that such great boons
as the conquest of smallpox and malaria, the development of surgery,
the improved treatment of the insane, and the general lowering of the
death rate have been brought about, not by the maudlin alms-giving of
Christian priests, but by the intelligent meliorism of rebels against
a blind faith, ruthless in their ways and means but stupendously
successful in their achievement.
Another critic, this time a Frenchman, Alfred Fouillée by name,[1]
chooses as his point of attack the Nietzschean doctrine that a struggle
is welcome and beneficial to the strong, that intelligent self-seeking,
accompanied by a certain willingness to take risks, is the road of
progress. A struggle, argues M. Fouillée, always means an expenditure
of strength, and strength, when so expended, is further weakened by
the opposing strength it arouses and stimulates. Darwin is summoned
from his tomb to substantiate this argument, but its exponent seems to
forget (while actually stating it!) the familiar physiological axiom,
so often turned to by Darwin, that strength is one of the effects of
use, and the Darwinian corollary that disuse, whether produced by
organized protection or in some other way, leads inevitably to weakness
and atrophy. In other words, the ideal strong man of M. Fouillée's
dream is one who seeks, with great enthusiasm, the readiest possible
way of ridding himself of his strength.