Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter VII

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER VII

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS

Nietzche's moral aim became practically, as we have seen, a striving for a new culture. Some consequences in the social and political field are now to be noted.

 

I

One is the sanction he feels obliged to give to slavery. Wherever there has been anything like culture or civilization in the world, something like slavery has been at its basis. It is so now. The current phrase "factory slave" is not a mere metaphor. When an individual works for others' good rather than his own, and has to, whether the compelling force is that of a personal master or of circumstances over which he has no control, slavery exists in principle.^[1] It is not a thing in which, as one might imagine from current representations of Nietzsche, he takes pleasure, but rather one of those forbidding facts which give a problematical character to existence in general. The only apology for slavery is that the possibility of attaining the higher ends of human existence is bound up with it. Culture—meaning now broadly any social state in which man rises above his natural life as an animal and pursues ends like philosophy and art—does not come at will, but is strictly conditioned. As before stated, it is the fruit of leisure; and that there may be leisure for some, others must work more than their share. ^a Such a necessity goes against our instincts of humanity and justice, and many have been led to rebel against it. We read of Emerson making a modest attempt in this direction. It was in the days of the Anti-Slavery agitation and he had been urging, with a somewhat larger view than the abolitionists ordinarily took, "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the abolition meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own work frees a slave." And now, as if at least to set his own life right, he goes to work digging in his Concord garden—if not all day, a part of it. He continues for a time, but he finds alas! that his writing and power of intellectual work are suffering, that, as he quaintly puts it, if his "terrestrial corn, beets, onions, and tomatoes flourish, the celestial archetypes do not"—and so comes at last to the reluctant conclusion, "The writer shall not dig." ^b The logic of the experience is old. Of course, when he ceased doing "his own work," some one else had to work the more (supposing that his writing and thinking were to continue), and "slavery" went on much as before. Nietzsche puts it broadly, "Slavery belongs to the nature of a culture" (zum Wesen einer Cultur gehört das Sklaventhum). "That there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for a development of art, the immense majority must be in service to a minority"; at the former's expense, by their surplus labor ( Nietzsche does not shun the Marxian word, Mehrarbeit), a privileged few are lifted above the struggle for existence.^[2] It is a hard view, but the truth, he thinks, is hard at times,^[3] and it seems a virtue to him not to deceive oneself. We in our day speak of the "dignity of man," the "dignity of labor," the "equal rights" of all—to him these are phantom conceptions by which we hide the real state of the case from our eyes, above all by which the great slave mass among us hide their real estate from their eyes.^[4]

 

II

But Nietzsche must not be misunderstood. In recognizing the slavery of the manual workers, he does not mean to place them in contrast with the employing and commercial classes who have rights to do as they please. One of the best and most intelligent of our American newspapers speaks of him as "par excellence the philosopher of the unscrupulous business man."^[5] This is the half-knowledge, or rather, to speak frankly, the ignorance of our cultivated circles with respect to Nietzsche today. In a normal social organization, the employing and commercial classes would in his view be subject to control as well as the workers. The unhappy thing in the modern world is that they have more or less emancipated themselves from control. This is the meaning of laisser faire—a doctrine of liberty in the interests of the employing and commercial classes. Nietzsche finds it working injuriously on the morality of modern peoples.^[6] The unrestrained egoism of individuals as of peoples is pushing them into mutually destructive struggles, and it is the most covetous who have the supreme place.^[7] Once a restraining influence was exercised by the Church, but the Reformation was obliged, in order to get a foothold, to declare many things adiaphora (i.e., not subject to the control of religious considerations), and economical activity was one of them, with the result that "the coarsest and most evil forces" have come to be the practically determining things almost everywhere.^[8] Educated classes and states alike are carried away by pecuniary ambitions, at once grandiose and contemptible. He speaks repeatedly of "the selfishness of the business class,""the brutal money-greed of the entrepreneurs."^[9] It is "a period of atoms, of atomistic chaos," into which we have passed.^[10]

Particularly after the Franco-Prussian war did Nietzsche notice the unchaining of this vulgar egoism in Germany. Rapacious striving, insatiable accumulating, selfish and shameless enjoying were characteristic marks of the time.^[11] "When the war was over, the luxury, the contempt of the French, the nationalism (das Nationale) displeased me. How far back had we gone compared with Goethe! Disgusting sensualism!"^[12] The new spirit perverted the aims of culture. Now forsooth education was to be for practical purposes; the kind that looked beyond money and gain, that consumed much time and separated one from society, was questioned—or stigmatized as "refined egoism," "Epicureanism." People said, "We have been too poor and modest hitherto, let us become rich and self-conscious, and then we also [i.e., as well as the French] shall have a culture!"—to which Nietzsche could only reply that this kind of a culture would be the opposite of what he believed in.^[13] Art was misconceived, though this tendency he admitted to be general in modern society: "modern art is luxury," the appanage of the wealthy class, their relief from fatigue or ennui. He comments on the unscrupulousness of those who take art and artists into their pay; for just as they "by the shrewdest and most hard-hearted use of their power have known how to make the weaker, the people, even more subservient, lower, less like the people of old (unvolksthümlicher), and to create the modern type of "worker," so they have laid hands on the greatest and purest things which the people have created out of their deepest need and in which they have tenderly expressed their soul in true and unique artist fashion, namely, their myths, their songs, their dances, their idioms of speech, in order to distil out of it all a sensuous remedy for the exhaustion and tedium of their existence."^[14] Indeed few socialists, and, I might add, few old-time aristocrats, could speak more disrespectfully than he of the industrial and commercial powers that now rule the world—the money powers included, who use the state itself for selfish purposes, and on occasion oppose war and even favor the masses against monarchs, since the masses incline to peace, and peace is better for them to ply their trade in!^[15] This does not mean that he fails to recognize the legitimate place of industry and trade and finance in the world, however large the scale on which they may be conducted; he has no notion of returning to an archaic simplicity of life after the manner of Tolstoy. "Every society must have its bowels," he remarks in homely fashion;^[16] and he would doubtless have agreed that the larger the society, the wider its range of need, the ampler the bowels might well be. The inversion of the true order of things which he finds today is simply that the bowels have become the end for which the body exists. Servants in control, instead of being controlled—this is the gist of the situation, the business as truly as the working classes coming normally under the serving or slave category. Freemen are a different class altogether—they are the higher types already described, whose manner of life the slaves make possible, those for whom the ordered life of society ultimately exists and from whom it normally receives its final direction.

 

III

In the light of the foregoing, the personal "non-political" attitude of Nietzsche is not so strange. It has little to do with theoretic anarchism. He recognizes the place and function of the state. While originating in force, violence, usurpation, and so of shameful birth, the result of it in time is an ordered social life on a large scale (for families or tribes or village communities are hardly as yet states), and the possibility of a class set free from labor, who can devote themselves to the higher ends of life. This is its justification—the justification even of the conquest and wrong that lie at its basis. "Proudly and calmly the Greek state advances before the judgment seat, and leads by the hand a blooming and glorious figure, Greek society. For this Helen it makes its wars—what gray-bearded judge will dare pass an adverse verdict?"^[17] Hence if Nietzsche does not take part in the political life of his time and even intentionally holds aloof from it, it was not for anarchistic reasons. In the first place it should be borne in mind that for all his criticism he was essentially loyal to his fatherland—even to Prussia. He admitted that one who is possessed by the furor philosophicus has no time for the furor politicus, but he added that if one's country is in actual need, one will not hesitate for a moment to take one's post;^[18] and he had himself, as we have seen, taken service under Prussia, so far as he could, in the war of 1870. Secondly, he held that the political art is essentially a special art, i.e., one not for everybody, but for those who are specially trained. All are properly subject to the state, but not all should have a hand in steering it. He thought that states are poorly arranged, in which other than statesmen have to interfere in public business, and that they merit their fate if they go to pieces from "these many statesmen."^[19] And, thirdly, he felt that politics is actually in a bad way at the present time—commercial aims are ruling it and socialism is threatening; wealth, comfort, "freedom" are the main things aimed at—it is a practically uncontrollable tendency that must have its day. He saw the new tendency, as just explained, taking possession of Germany. Hence he was not at home in the world about him. The Socrates of Plato compared the wise man under the political conditions of the then-existing world to one who takes shelter behind a wall, when the wind is making a hurricane of dust and rain.^[20] Something like this was Nietzsche's attitude to the politics of his day. He felt that a valid order did not exist—that a kind of madness was taking possession of men's minds. Or, if I am not again connecting him with too great a name, he was like Plato himself when the latter turned the energy of his thought and imagination to the construction of an ideal res publica—and indeed Nietzsche's conception in detail was not unlike Plato's, save as he gave (particularly at this time) a vital place to the artist, a class whom Plato wished to banish. Nietzsche himself notes that the fire and exaltation of Plato's political passion went in this ideal (rather than practical) direction.^[21] He comments on Niebuhr's reproach against Plato that he was a poor citizen, and says, Let one who feels in this way be a good citizen, and let Plato be what he was.^[22] In other words, political activity has a quite secondary place in his estimation—though this does not mean that he gave it no place. A state-favored philosophy he counted especially undesirable, states being what they are. The state wants only what is useful to itself. Better let philosophers grow wild or even be persecuted, he once ventures to say, and then perhaps the real ones will be sifted out.^[23] A happy contrast, in his judgment, of the Greek state with the prevailing type of state today is, that it did not assume to be a regulator or overseer of culture, but simply a good muscular helper, a hardy escort for it among rough realities.^[24]

1. Nietzsche's broad use of the term "slave" becomes even more conspicuous later, see pp. 127, 249-50, 442-3.
2. Werke, IX, 151. Nietzsche is here stating the presuppositiona of Greek culture, but the truth is to his mind general.
3. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4.
4. Werke, IX, 148-9.
5. Springfield Weekly Republican, 14 Nov., 1907.
6. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 2.
7. Birth of Tragedy, sect. 15. "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6.
8. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4.
9. Ibid., sect. 6, "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4.
10. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4.
11. Ibid., sect. 6.
12. Werke, XI, 119, § 369.
13. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6.
14. "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 8.
15. Werke, IX, 160-2. As against this kind of supremacy, Nietzsche is willing to have war.
16. "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6.
17. Werke, IX, 159.
18. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7
19. Ibid., sect. 7.
20. The Republic, vi, 496.
21. Werke, IX, 164.
22. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 8.
23. Ibid., sect. 8.
24. Werke, IX, 369, 370.