Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter II

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER II

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING

I

Nietzsche's life was practically one of thought. Of outer events, "experiences" in the ordinary sense, there were few: "we have not our heart there," he confesses, "and not even our ear."^[1] But to the great problems of life he stood in a very personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others' sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and mind co-operated. "I have written all my books with my whole body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems are.""May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths—let one look at my previous writings." "These things you know as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I am the wagon itself."^[2] These were private memoranda that have been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally related to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is "impersonal," touching them only with the feelers of cool, curious thought.^[3] So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parodying of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in effect irony against higher strivings in general—Cervantes, he says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. ^[4] Some have even been led to question whether Nietzsche was capable of humor.^a But there is no need to go to this length. Not only does he give a high place to laughter in his books, not only are there special instances of humorous description to be found there, but colleagues of his at Basel, like Burckhardt and Overbeck, testify to his infectious laughter at their frequent meeting place ("Baumannshöhle"), Nietzsche himself owning that he had much to make up for, since he had laughed so little as child and boy.^[5] For all this the undercurrent of his life was unquestionably serious, and he cannot be placed among writers who give us much surface cheer. Occasionally he indulges in pleasantries to the very end of relief from graver work—such, for instance, as those which make a part of "The Case of Wagner" (see the preface to this pamphlet, where it is also said that the subject itself is not one to make light about), and those in Twilight of the Idols. In the preface to the latter he remarks that when one has a great task like that of a "turning round (Umwerthung) of all values," one must shake off at times the all too heavy weight of seriousness it brings.

As his motives in philosophizing were personal, so were the results he attained—some of them at least: they were for him, helped him to live, whether they were valuable for others or not. Referring to certain of his writings, he calls them his "recipe and self-prepared medicine against life-weariness."^[6] In a posthumous fragment (perhaps from a preface for a possible book), he says, "Here a philosophy—one of my philosophies—comes to expression, which has no wish to be called 'love of wisdom,' but begs, perhaps from pride, for a more modest name: a repulsive name indeed, which may for its part contribute to making it remain what it wishes to be: a philosophy for myself—with the motto: satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, satis est nullus."^[7] Sometimes he distrusts writing for the general, saying that the thinker may make himself clearer in this way, but is liable to become flatter also, not expressing his most intimate and best self—he confesses that he is shocked now and then to see how little of his own inmost self is more than hinted at in his writings.^[8] He admires Schopenhauer for having written for himself; for no one, he says, wishes to be deceived, least of all a philosopher who takes as his law, Deceive no one, not even thyself. He comes to say at last, "I take readers into account no longer: how could I write for readers? … But I note myself down, for myself."^[9] "Mihi ipsi scripsi—so it is; and in this way shall each one do his best for himself according to his kind."^[10] At least this became an ideal, for he owns that sometimes he has hardly the courage for his own thoughts ("I have only rarely the courage for what I really know").^[11]

If I may give in a sentence what seems to me the inmost psychology and driving force of his thinking, it was like this:—Being by nature and by force of early training reverent, finding, however, his religious faith undermined by science and critical reflection, his problem came to be how, consistently with science and the stern facts of life and the world, the old instincts of reverence might still have measurable satisfaction, and life again be lit up with a sense of transcendent things. He was at bottom a religious philosopher—this, though the outcome of his thinking is not what would ordinarily be called religious. There is much irony in him, much contempt, but it is because he has an ideal; and his final problem is how some kind of a practical approximation to the ideal may be made. He himself says that one who despises is ever one who has not forgotten how to revere.^[12]

 

II

The question is sometimes raised whether Nietzsche was a philosopher at all. Some deny it, urging that he left no systematic treatises behind him; they admit that he may have been a poet, or a master of style ("stylist," to use a barbarous word imported from the German), or a prophet—but he was not a thinker.^{[13] b} But because a man does not write systematically, or even does not care to, it does not follow that he has not deep-going, more or less reasoned thoughts, and that these thoughts do not hang together. Nietzsche reflected on first principles in almost every department of human interest (except perhaps mathematics). Though his prime interest is man and morals, he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics and the general constitution of the world. Poets, "stylists," prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their theory of knowledge,^c do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at times, perhaps is really so. Not only does he express strongly what he thinks at a given time and leaves it to us to reconcile it with what he says at other times, not only does he need for interpreter some one with a literary as well as scientific sense, but his views actually differ more or less from time to time, and even at the same time—and Professor Höffding is not quite without justification in suggesting that they might more properly have been put in the form of a drama or dialogue.^[14] Nietzsche himself, in speaking of his "philosophy," qualifies and says "philosophies," as we have just seen. And yet there is coherence to a certain extent in each period of his life, and at last there is so much that we might almost speak of a system. There is even a certain method in his changes—one might say, using Hegelian language, that there is first an affirmation, then a negation, and finally an affirmation which takes up the negation into itself. Indeed, the more closely I have attended to his mental history, the more I have become aware of continuing and constant points of view throughout—so much so that I fear I may be found to repeat myself unduly, taking him up period by period as I do.^[15] The testimony of others may be interesting in this connection. Professor René Berthelot remarks in the Grande Encyclopédie, though with particular to the works of the last period, "They are the expression of a perfectly coherent doctrine, although Nietzsche has never made a systematic exposition of it."^[16] Dr. Richard Beyer says, "His doctrine does not lack system but systematic presentation, which however also Socrates, a Leibnitz did not leave behind them."^[17] Professor Vaihinger, who writes professedly not as a disciple, much less apostle of Nietzsche, but simply as an historian of philosophy, describes his book by saying, "I have brought the seemingly disorderly scattered fragments, the disjecta membra, into a strictly consistent system."^{[18] d} Nietzsche himself, though ordinarily too much in his struggles to grasp them as a whole and see their final import, occasionally had a clear moment and looked as from a height upon the sum-total of his work. Writing from Turin to Brandes, 4th May, 1888, to the effect that his weeks there had turned out "better than any for years, above all more philosophic," he adds, "Almost every day for one or two hours I have reached such a point of energy that I could see as from an eminence my total conception—the immense variety of problems lying spread out before me in relief and clear outline. For this a maximum of force is needed, which I had hardly hoped for. Everything hangs together, for years everything has been going in the right direction; one builds his philosophy like a beaver—is necessary and does not know it."^[19] He once expressed a wish that some one should make a kind of résumé of the results of his thinking,^[20] evidently with the notion that there were results which might be put in orderly fashion. Professor Richter describes his own book—the most valuable one on the philosophical side which has been written on Nietzsche—as a modest attempt to fulfil that wish.^[21] But why argue or quote? Any one who cares to read on in these pages will be able to judge for himself whether and how far Nietzsche was a philosopher—no one imagines that he was one in the sense that Kant and Aristotle were.

 

III

I have spoken of Nietzsche's changes. He is strongly contrasted in this respect with his master Schopenhauer, whose views crystallized when he was still young and varied thereafter in no material point. Only one who changes, he tells us, is kindred to him. "One must be willing to pass away, in order to be able to rise again."^[22] It is easy to misunderstand the spirit of the changes. Professor Saintsbury can see little in them but the desire to be different.^[23] Nietzsche himself admits that he likes short-lived habits, hence not an official position, or continual intercourse with the same person, or a fixed abode, or one kind of health.^[24] And yet the movements of his thought impress me as on the whole more necessitated than chosen. His break with the religious faith of his youth was scarcely from a whim. If one doubts, let one read the mournful paragraph beginning, "Thou wilt never more pray," and judge for himself^[25]—or note the tone of "All that we have loved when we were young has deceived us," or of "What suffering for a child always to judge good and evil differently from his mother, and to be scorned and despised where he reveres!"^[26] So no one who reads with any care the records of his intercourse with Wagner, can think that he welcomed the final break. Rather was he made ill by it, in body and soul—it was the great tragedy of his mature life.^[27] Giving up the ideas of free-will and responsibility was not from choice; even the idea of "eternal recurrence" was first forced upon him. Almost the only region in which he felt free to follow his will was in projecting a moral ideal, and in the moral field itself he recognized strict limits. In general, he not so much chose his path as chose to follow it. He felt a "task," and the "burden" of his "truths."^[28] "Has ever a man searched on the path of truth in the way I have—namely, striving and arguing against all that was grateful to my immediate feeling?"^[29] He opposed the artist love of pleasure, the artist lack of conscience, which would persuade us to worship where we no longer believe.^[30] Nowhere perhaps more than in the religious field does feeling run riot today, nowhere does epicureanism, soft hedonism, more flourish—Nietzsche put it from him. He had the will to be clean with himself, hard with himself—he despised feeling's "soft luxurious flow," if I may borrow Newman's phrase, when the issue was one of truth. He regarded "libertinism of the intellect" as, along with vice, crime, celibacy, pessimism, anarchism, a consequence of decadence.^{[31] e} Sometimes his dread of being taken in seems almost morbid. For instance, in referring to the feelings connected with doing for others, not for ourselves, he says that there is "far too much charm and sweetness in these feelings not to make it necessary to be doubly mistrustful and to ask, 'are they not perhaps seductions?' That they please—please him who has them and him who enjoys their fruits, also the mere onlooker—this still is no argument for them, but just a reason for being circumspect."^[32] Pleasure, comfort, the wishes of the heart no test of truth—such is his ever-recurring point of view. Indeed, instead of there being any pre-established harmony between the true and the agreeable, he thinks that the experience of stricter, deeper minds is rather to the contrary.^[33] Sometimes his impulse to the true and real is a torment to him, he is böse towards it and declares that not truth, but appearance, falsehood, is divine;^[34] and yet the impulse masters him. Posterity, he says, speaks of a man rising higher and higher, but it knows nothing of the martyrdom of the ascent; "a great man is pushed, pressed, crowded, martyred up into his height."^[35] He views the philosopher's task as something hard, unwilled, unrefusable; and so far as he is alone, it is not because he wills it, but because he is something that does not find its like.^[36] "A philosophy that does not promise to make one happier and more virtuous, that rather lets it be understood that one taking service under it will probably go to ruin—that is, will be solitary in his time, will be burned and scalded, will have to know many kinds of mistrust and hate, will need to practise much hardness against himself and alas! also against others—such a philosophy offers easy flattery to no one: one must be born for it."^[37] Not all are so born, he freely admits, and he speaks of himself as a law for his own, not for all. He even says that a deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood, for "in the latter case his vanity perhaps suffers, but in the former his heart, his sympathy, which always says, 'Ah, why will you have things as hard as I?'"^[38] So independence is to his mind something for few, and one should not attempt it, unless "compelled."^[39] So much did he feel that necessity hedges us about and that we must come to terms with it, that amor fati became one of his mottoes.^[40]

 

IV

And yet loneliness, and, above all, change in loneliness are not agreeable things, and it is impossible to avoid a sense of insecurity in the midst of them. With all his assurance Nietzsche knew that his way was a dangerous one, and he had his moments of misgiving. He craved companionship and the support that companionship gives. Once the confession drops from him that after an hour of sympathetic intercourse with men of opposite views his whole philosophy wavers, so foolish does it seem to wish to be in the right at the cost of love, and so hard not to be able to communicate what is dearest for fear of losing sympathy—"hinc meae lacrimae."^[41] He had accordingly no wish to impose himself on others. He asks youthful readers not to take his doctrines forthwith as a guide of life, but rather as theses to be weighed; he throws the responsibility on them, urging them to be true to themselves even against him, and saying that so they will be really true to him.^[42] In the same spirit he says,

"It lureth thee, my mode and speech?
Thou followest me, to hear me teach?
Nay! Guide thyself—honest and fair—
And follow me, with care! with care!"^[43]

He regards it as part of the humanity of a teacher to caution his pupils against himself, and even says that a pupil rewards his teacher ill who always remains his pupil.^[44] Knowing from his own experience how difficult it is to find the truth, having become mistrustful of those who are sure they have it, deeming such confidence indeed an obstacle to truth—knowing that one may actually have to turn against oneself in the higher loyalty, he holds those alone to be genuine pupils, i.e., genuine continuers of a teacher's thought, who, if need be, oppose it.^[45] He wished his own philosophy to advance slowly among men, to be tried, criticised, or even overcome. He felt that it was above all problems which he presented, and his most pressing preliminary need was of help in formulating them—"as soon as you feel against me, you do not understand my state of mind, and hence not my arguments either."^[46] What a sense he had of the uncertainty of his way is shown in a memorandum like this: "This way is so dangerous! I dare not speak to myself, being like a sleep-walker, who wanders over house-roofs and has a sacred right not to be called by name. 'What do I matter?' is the only consoling voice I wish to hear."^[47] He came to have a sense of the problematical in morality itself—just that about which most of us have no doubts at all (whether because we think, or do not think, I leave undetermined). "Science [positive knowledge] reveals the flow of things, but not the goal."^[48] It has been proved impossible to build a culture on scientific knowledge alone.^[49] Hence he says frankly to us, "This is my way, where is yours? The way—there is not."^[50]

And yet it would be leaving something out of account if I did not add that in following his uncertain, venturesome way, Nietzsche experienced a certain elevation of spirit. It was the mood of the explorer—the risk gives added zest. He sometimes uses a word that sounds strange on the lips of a thinker: "dance." It connotes for him joy, but joy that goes with the meeting of danger and risk. The dancer is a fine balancer, as when one treads a tight rope or goes on smooth ice. He ventures, goes ahead on a basis of probabilities and possibilities. Nietzsche speaks of bidding farewell to assured conviction or the wish for certainty, of balancing oneself on delicate ropes and possibilities, of dancing even on the edge of abysses.^[51] Some think that by dancing he meant playing with words and arbitrary thinking, ^f but it is something, he tells us, that just the philosopher has got to do well—a quick, fine, glad dealing with uncertainties and dangers is the philosopher's ideal and art.^[52] In a sense, all movement involves risk, even walking does, and dancing is only a heightened instance. It may be not quite irrelevant to remark that one of Nietzsche's tests of books or men or music was, whether there was movement in them or no, whether they could walk and still more dance; also that he himself liked to think, walking, leaping, climbing, dancing—above all on lonely mountains or by the sea where the paths were hazardous.^{[53] g} He had a kind of distrust of ideas that came to one seated over a book, and thought he had, so to speak, caught Flaubert in the act, when he found him observing, "on ne peut penser et écrire qu'assis."^[54] The venturesome element in life, above all in the life of thought, only lent it a new charm. Though at first the large amount of accident and chaos in the world oppressed him, he came to say "dear accident," "beautiful chaos." For once he would have agreed with George Eliot,

"Nay, never falter: no great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty."

The mind, he felt, reaches the acme of its power in dealing with uncertainties; it is the weaker sort who want the way assured beyond doubt.^[55]

Because of his variations of mood, it is not easy definitely to characterize it. Professor Ziegler speaks of him as a "metaphysically dissatisfied" man, and Dr. Möbius has a similar view.^[56] Nietzsche once spoke of himself as "profondément triste."^[57] It does not appear, however, that he was temperamentally melancholy; Möbius describes him rather as "sanguine-choleric,"^[58] and his sister says (despite what I have already quoted) that he was given to playfulness and jokes as a boy—it was his thoughts, his disillusionment about men and things, that saddened him. With the shadow lurking "only around the corner for most of us—a skepticism as to life's value" (to quote Miss Jane Addams)^[59] he was only too familiar. Let one read not only the passages I have already cited, but one in Thus spake Zarathustra beginning "The sun is already long down,"^[60] or a description of the proud sufferer,^[61] or an almost bitter paragraph on the last sacrifice of religion, namely the sacrifice of God himself.^[62] And yet he met his depression and triumphed over it. He suffered much, renounced much—we feel it particularly in the works of the middle period^[63]—and yet he gained far more than he lost, and will probably go down in history as one of the great affirmers of life and the world. But his joy is ever a warrior's joy—it is never the easy serenity, the unruffled optimism of Emerson.

1. Preface, § 1, to Genealogy of Morals.
2. Werke, XI, 382, §§ 590-2; cf. XIV, 361, § 231.
3. Joyful Science, § 345.
4. Werke, X, 481, § 1; XI, 106-7, § 332.
5. Cf. R. M. Meyer, Nietzsche, pp. 135-6.
6. Nietzsche's Briefe, II, 566.
7. Werke, XIV, 352, § 214.
8. Briefe, III, 277.
9. Werke, XIV, 360, § 288.
10. Briefe, II, 567.
11. Ibid', III, 274.
12. Genealogy of Morals, III, § 25. Cf. Georges Chatterton-Hill's characterization, "Always an essentially religious nature" (The Philosophy of Nietzsche: an Exposition and an Appreciation, pp. 14, 114).
13. So, among many, Paul Carus, Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, p. 101.
14. Harald Höffding, Moderne Philosophen, pp. 141-2.
15. I heard of a German book on Nietzsche not long ago—I cannot now remember its title—which disregarded the division of his life into periods altogether.
16. Art., "Nietzsche."
17. Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe,, pp. 34-5.
18. Hans Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph, pp. 4-8.
19. Briefe, II, 305-6.
20. Ibid., IV, 170.
21. Preface to the second edition.
22. Werke, XII, 369, § 722.
23. George Saintsbury, The later Nineteenth Century, p. 246.
24. Joyful Science, § 295.
25. Ibid., § 285.
26. Werke, XIV, 231, § 472; XIII, 220, § 525.
27. Joyful Science, § 279, beginning "We were friends and have become strange to one another," is supposed to refer to Wagner—I know of few more moving passages in literature.
28. Cf. preface, § 4, to Human, All-too-Human; Werke, XIV, 413, § 293.
29. Werke, XIV, 350, § 207.
30. Preface, § 4, to Dawn of Day.
31. Cf. Will to Power, §§ 1041, 42, 43, 95.
32. Beyond Good and Evil, § 33.
33. The Antichristian, § 50.
34. Will to Power, § 1011.
35. Werke, XIV, 99, § 213.
36. Beyond Good and Evil, § 212; Will to Power, § 985.
37. Werke, XIV, 412, § 291.
38. Beyond Good and Evil, § 290.
39. Ibid., § 29.
40. Joyful Science, § 276.
41. Briefe, IV, 35-6.
42. Werke (pocket ed.), III, 442; cf. VI, 46, § 23.
43. Ibid., VI, 42, § 7 (the translation is by Thomas Common).
44. Dawn of Day, § 447; Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3.
45. Werke (pocket ed.), III, 441, § 19; Dawn of Day, § 542.
46. Werke, XI, 384, § 599.
47. Ibid., XI, 385, § 603.
48. Werke, XIII, 357, § 672.
49. I borrow here from Riehl, op. cit., p. 67.
50. Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2.
51. Joyful Science, § 347. One recalls Shelley's words, "Danger which sports upon the brink of precipes has been my playmate."
52. Ibid., § 381
53. Ibid., § 366.
54. Ecce Homo, II, § 1; Twilight of the Idols, i, § 34.
55. Will to Power, § 963.
56. Theobald Ziegler, Friedrich Nietzsche; P. J. Möbius, Nietzsche, p. 36.
57. Briefe, II, 597.
58. Op. cit., p. 56; cf. Nietzsche of himself, Werke, XI, 382, § 587.
59. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, p. 103.
60. II, x.
61. Dawn of Day, § 425.
62. Beyond Good and Evil, § 55; cf. Will to Power, §§ 302-3.
63. See preface, § 5, to Mixed Opinions and Sayings.