FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Philosophyin the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste, and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity, but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth. If the true is universally true, if a thing eitheris, oris not, then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or, by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely denied, and denied in two ways.
First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeitingof the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.”5
Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs.... Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certainplace one can form conclusions as to the soil.Thatmode of life, of viewing human affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says, “dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view he never departed. InBeyond Good and Evilhe repeats his belief in the personal character of thought: “In eachcardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully—he can only follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again inZarathustra: “‘This is now my way—where is yours?’ Thus did I answer those who asked me ‘the way.’ Fortheway—it doth not exist.”
And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets.To misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.
We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here, at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate verisimilitude.
Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple, upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit—agracious reminder of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year, before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’” This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a profound sense of the politenessthat an aristocrat owes to himself. He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen, and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal, who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.
His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion—nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines.”
He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.”
He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,” and remembersthe unusual dialectical clearness he enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”
Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background on which we must set his work.
The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only exceptions, for thoughThe Birth of Tragedy, and the essays calledThoughts out of Season, are less disintegrated than later books, we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles” at the beginning ofThe Twilight of the Idols. EvenThus Spake Zarathustrawas built in a similar manner, though disguised by the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues; because they were often written in swift succession, one after another, there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast, and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of thoseten thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman, and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can butbe a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books, but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of continual exploration.
“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,” but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility. Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude. But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is desirable.
Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements, which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in practice that circumstances determine.
We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to noticeit as characteristic of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will, that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and examine the Nietzschean universe.
The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write of hisEureka: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die;—or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy, expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite pain:
“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, indulging a hope—that the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for ever, and for ever,and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?” (Poe’sEureka.)
“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief—let us say, rather, indulging a hope—that the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for ever, and for ever,and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?” (Poe’sEureka.)
Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only—and herein lay the importance of his idea to himself—he saw it renewing itself in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:
“If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres of energy—and every other concept remains indefinite and therefore useless—it follows therefrom that the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must once have been realised; not only this,but it must have been realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone, and since every one of these combinations would determine the whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all eternity.”
“If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres of energy—and every other concept remains indefinite and therefore useless—it follows therefrom that the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must once have been realised; not only this,but it must have been realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone, and since every one of these combinations would determine the whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all eternity.”
Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem:
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omnePraeteritum spatium, tum motus materiaiMultimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine postaHaec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vagequeDeerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omnePraeteritum spatium, tum motus materiaiMultimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine postaHaec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vagequeDeerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omnePraeteritum spatium, tum motus materiaiMultimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine postaHaec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vagequeDeerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne
Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai
Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,
Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta
Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:
Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:
Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius6admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are themotions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”
The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before every deed that thou doest—Is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an infinite number of times?—is the best ballast.” It does not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as “the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “themeans of enduring it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.
Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the will to power, in which that otherwill may or may not be included. Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power, unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area over which to exercise it.
But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity. Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again, Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding, not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.” He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to the slow evolution which hewould never have denied. He could say with Seannchan, the poet:
“The stars had come so near me that I caughtTheir singing. It was praise of that great raceThat would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,With a high head, and open hand, and how,Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
“The stars had come so near me that I caughtTheir singing. It was praise of that great raceThat would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,With a high head, and open hand, and how,Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
“The stars had come so near me that I caughtTheir singing. It was praise of that great raceThat would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,With a high head, and open hand, and how,Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
“The stars had come so near me that I caught
Their singing. It was praise of that great race
That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,
With a high head, and open hand, and how,
Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the other.
Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmicalZarathustrareminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the sooth-sayingLeaves of Grass. But his friendship is very different from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, thelarge tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.” A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this: “Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life. Nietzsche, who had publishedThe Birth of Tragedyto serve Wagner, wroteThe Case of Wagnerto destroy him, or,perhaps, to cleanse himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice ofidealism, by noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I had cherished of him.”
Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati, the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying” to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest. He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually preserved by aesthetic theory. HisBirth of Tragedywas not merely an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art. These words were “Apollonian”and “Dionysian.” The latter word has been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:
1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.”2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living and conspicuous representatives oftwoworlds of art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius oftheprincipium individuationisthrough which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”
1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.”
2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living and conspicuous representatives oftwoworlds of art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius oftheprincipium individuationisthrough which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”
He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an alternation of conquest and captivity:
“And if the babe is born a boyHe’s given to a woman old,Who nails him down upon a rock,Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.She binds iron thorns around his head,She pierces both his hands and feet,She cuts his heart out at his side,To make it feel both cold and heat.Her fingers number every nerve,Just as a miser counts his gold;She lives upon his shrieks and cries,And she grows young as he grows old.Till he becomes a bleeding youth,And she becomes a virgin bright;Then he rends up his manacles,And binds her down for his delight.”
“And if the babe is born a boyHe’s given to a woman old,Who nails him down upon a rock,Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.She binds iron thorns around his head,She pierces both his hands and feet,She cuts his heart out at his side,To make it feel both cold and heat.Her fingers number every nerve,Just as a miser counts his gold;She lives upon his shrieks and cries,And she grows young as he grows old.Till he becomes a bleeding youth,And she becomes a virgin bright;Then he rends up his manacles,And binds her down for his delight.”
“And if the babe is born a boyHe’s given to a woman old,Who nails him down upon a rock,Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
“And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,She pierces both his hands and feet,She cuts his heart out at his side,To make it feel both cold and heat.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat.
Her fingers number every nerve,Just as a miser counts his gold;She lives upon his shrieks and cries,And she grows young as he grows old.
Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth,And she becomes a virgin bright;Then he rends up his manacles,And binds her down for his delight.”
Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles,
And binds her down for his delight.”
It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live—because Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age” he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo, shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of Apollo.
There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conceptionof truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and are continually being re-madebyman. “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ didnotoriginate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves; that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as asurvival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations” of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question. The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest andtame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for example, of the “widespread heaven of clearwickedspirituality,” a spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be that which is dancedover, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest—be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves. He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with moralities, but asks each of his “highermen” to be true to his own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to a higher, a more laughing perfection.
After the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that is capable of moral interpretationare in some way changed. He was not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,” as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill with hasty scene-painting the gaps intheir construction. No man is capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.
Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of La Rochefoucauld,Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears, and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone. The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his remarks on self-development or war.
I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements. When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in thislanguage an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far from the truth.Thus spake Zarathustra, that Ossianic poem of a hero of thought,Ecce Homo, in the self-assertion of which is not only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph ofThe Birth of Tragedy; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness; in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun, wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.
In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator. In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters. When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them hoped to educate more than men of a cityor of a nation, and for the service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children ofhishope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them.”
In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others, he found theballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life, theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.” He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant, daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.
I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:
“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then they disparaged all high hopes.Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim.‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it gnaweth.Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now. A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”
“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then they disparaged all high hopes.
Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim.
‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it gnaweth.
Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now. A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.
But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”
The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all, to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out, though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth, of unsoiled ambition, ofthe flame alight before the altar of the potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility.
1912.