Nietzsche the thinker/Notes
NOTES
CHAPTER I
aThere is this modicum of truth in the extravagant statement of the Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Nietzsche," "Revolt against the whole civilized [sic] environment in which he was brought up is the keynote of Nietzsche's literary career." On the other hand, R. M. Meyer finds in him a reflection of the voluntaristic tendency, both theoretical and practical, of the nineteenth century." This is accordingly Nietzsche's point of departure: there are beings who 'will.' At Descartes' proposition, 'I think'—he had to shrug his shoulders critically. For not in vain is Nietzsche a child of the time, in which Treitschke reduced all politics to will to power—and Bismarck lived Treitschke's politics. Not in vain a child of the time, for which 'willing' was equivalent to 'willing to effect,' 'willing to create'; in which young Disraeli declared, 'What I teach I will accomplish'; in which men of force (Kraftnaturen) like Gambetta, Lassalle, Mazzini, Garibaldi had vital influence on tens of thousands" (Nietzsche, sein Leben imd seine Werke, pp. 679-80). Cf. also August Dorner, Pessimismus, Nietzsche und Naturalismus, p. 191.
b As to the political movement of the Germans, see pp. 466-7 of this volume.
c He said the same of Schopenhauer, adding, "The Germans have no finger for us, they have in general no fingers, only paws." Cf., as to his differences with German idealists, Werke, XIII, 337-8, § 838.
d As to German soldiers, see the discriminating article by Julius Bab in Die Hilfe, December 31, 1915, "Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche Gegenwart." Stephen Graham is of the opinion (he says "sure") that "many British soldiers who have rifles on their shoulders today have learned of Nietzsche and have a warm place in their hearts for him" (Russia and the World, 1915, p. 138).
e Havelock Ellis and the late William Wallace published valuable short studies of Nietzsche at an early date.
f Cf. Karl Joël, Nietzsche und die Romantik, p. 328; Henri Lichtenberger, La Philosophie de Nietzsche, pp. 83 ff.; R. Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leben und sein Werk (2d ed.), pp. 91 ff.; H. Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph, p. 16; Ernst Horneffer, Nietzsches letztes Schaffen, p. 20; August Dorner, op. cit., pp. 118, 122 n.; R. H. Grützmacher, Nietzsche, ein akademisches Publikum, pp. 49-52; H. Höffding, Moderne Philosophen, p. 145; R. M. Meyer, op. cit., passim. For an instance of arbitrary judgment in the matter, see George Saintsbury's The Later Nineteenth Century, p. 244; History of Criticism, pp. 582-4. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, I, xxv) even says that Nietzsche became a victim of madness, when he fell away from Wagner! More reasonable, or at least reasoned, conjectures appear in Theobald Ziegler's Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 20, and P. J. Möbius' Nietzsche, passim. On the other hand, William Wallace and Havelock Ellis saw the facts as they were at the outset. A statement of Julius Kaftan, a not over-friendly critic who was with Nietzsche in Sils-Maria for three weeks in the late summer of 1888, is interesting: "I have during the whole time never perceived any trace whatever of an incipient mental derangement." At the same time, Nietzsche himself appears to have had a foreboding at times of some sort of a collapse, writing once to a friend, "The fearful and almost unceasing sufferings of my life allow me to long for the end, and according to some indications the stroke of the brain that will release me (der erlösende Hirnschlag) is near enough to warrant my hope. So far as torture and renunciation are concerned, I may measure the life of my last years with that of any ascetic of any time" (I am unable to locate this letter, and borrow the quotation from Richard Beyer, Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung alter Werthe, pp. 34-5).
g Havelock Ellis (Affirmations, p. 11) quotes this. Some years later (1876), Edouard Schuré saw him in Bayreuth and describes his impression as follows: "In talking with him I was struck by the superiority of his intellect and by the strangeness of his physiognomy. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the prominent cheekbones of the Slav. The heavy, drooping mustache and the bold cut of the face would have given him the aspect of a cavalry officer, if there had not been something at once timid and haughty in his air. The musical voice and slow speech indicated the artist's organization, while the circumspect meditative carriage was that of a philosopher. Nothing more deceptive than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the painful travail of thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer and of a fanatical visionary. The double character of the gaze produced a disquieted and disquieting expression, all the more so since it seemed to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of effusion the gaze was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but soon became hostile again. His whole appearance had the distant air, the discreet and veiled disdain which often characterizes aristocrats of thought" (Revue des deux mondes, August 15, 1895, pp. 782-3).
h It is Nietzsche's own story, as narrated by P. Deussen, Erinnerungen an F. Nietzsche, p. 24.
i Cf. Möbius, op. cit., p. 50. See, however, R. H. Grützmacher, op. cit., pp. 16, 17. R. Freiherr von Seydlitz, who knew Nietzsche well, says, "One thing was lacking in him which accompanies the 'great man' as ordinarily understood: he had no dark, ignoble sides to his nature—not even 'sensual coarseness'" (Der neue deutsche Rundschau, June, 1899, p. 627).
j H. L. Mencken says that Nietzsche "fell in love" with Frauein Lou Salomé, and "pursued her over half of Europe when she fled" (The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 42) . Both of these statements are exaggerations. Meyer, the best all-round authority on Nietzsche, remarks that there is no indication of warmer feelings in the case than those of friendship, and that Nietzsche thought of her rather as a wife for his friend Paul Rée (op. cit., p. 168). Nietzsche did once (spring of 1876) make an offer of marriage to a young Dutch woman, but she was already engaged (the letters are given by Meyer, op. cit., 156-9). See further a summary of Nietzsche's various views, and half-formed wishes, on the subject of marriage for himself, by Richter, op. cit., p. 59.
k I have to borrow here from Riehl, op. cit., p. 23. Cf. the apt remarks of A. Wolf, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 23.
l Meyer ascribes it in part to the influence of Rée (op. cit., p. 153—cf. the fuller discussion of the subject, pp. 295-300, where Meyer questions the inference often drawn that Nietzsche was naturally unsystematic) .
m So in a letter to Georg Brandes, April 10, 1888, referring to some unspecified year in the past. Meyer (op. cit., p. 161) says that there were 118 sick days in 1879. After the autumn of 1881, Nietzsche did better—for in 1888 he said that in the previous six years he had never had during each year less than five or more than fifteen bad days (so his sister, Werke, pocket ed., VI, xxviii).
CHAPTER II
a So Möbius, op. cit., p. 28; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 113.
b What Nietzsche thought of style is hinted at in his remark that the only way to improve one's style is to improve one's thought (The Wanderer etc., § 131; cf. Meyer's admirable remarks, op. cit., p. 628). At the same time, there is no doubt that he had fine feeling in this direction. Joël compares him with Goethe, finding him greater in so far as he is more conscious—Goethe's style flowing like nature, Nietzsche's being more art (op. cit., pp. 359-61). Even Saintsbury, after referring to Nietzsche's mention of Leopardi, Emerson, Merimée, and Landor as the four masters of prose in the nineteenth century, says that he is to be put along with them (op. cit., p. 245) . Nietzsche's style—in one particular, at least—might be described as seductive, like Newman's in the Apologia and many of the Sermons: for the moment at least you would like to believe what he says. On the other hand, Meyer notes his occasional slips and negligences of style, and the tastelessness of some of the word-constructions in Zarathustra (op. cit., pp. 624, 416).
c Cf. Rudolph Eisler, Nietzsches Erkenntnisstheorie und Metaphysik; Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und das Erkenntnissproblem; Siegbert Flemming, Nietzsches Metaphysik und ihr Verhältniss zu Erkenntnisstheorie und Ethik; also special articles, such as "Friedrich Nietzsches Erkenntnisstheorie," by P. Mauritius Demuth, Philosophischea Jahrbuch (Görres-Gesellschaft), October, 1913. René Berthelot makes an extended critical examination of Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in Un romantisme utilitaire. Vol. I, pp. 33-193.
d Cf. Meyer's view, op. cit., pp. 293, 298, 306, 378, and Ziegler's ("more thinker than poet"), op. cit., p. 21. On the other hand, Heinrich Weinel says, "Whoever allows himself to be persuaded that he [Nietzsche] is a man of strict science will observe with astonishment how easy to refute Nietzsche is, how full of leaps and contradictions his thinking is, even when one clearly separates the epochs of his activity" (Ibsen, Björnson, Nietzsche, pp. 13, 14). Similarly, Oswald Külpe, "The sterner philosophical disciplines, such as logic and the theory of knowledge, Nietzsche touched upon only casually, and never gave himself up to their problems with original interest; and in the other branches, which he liked to cultivate, such as metaphysics and ethics, he has no exact results to offer. We cannot, therefore, call him a philosopher" (Philosophy of the Present in Germany, p. 128). It must be freely conceded that Nietzsche gives us little in the form of strict science, also that he published "no exact results"; whether this prevents his being a substantially consistent thinker with a tolerably definite outcome of thought, is another question.
e A. K. Rogers strangely misconceives Nietzsche at this point (Philosophical Review, January, 1912, p. 39).
f So Kurt Breysig, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, II (1896), p. 20; contrast Meyer's explanations, op. cit., p. 448.
g Cf. Paul Lanzky's account of Nietzsche's habits, as given in D. Halévy's La Vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, p. 305.
CHAPTER III
a Among philologists he refers to the "renowned Lobeck" in particular. His own view of Dionysus is set forth in The Birth of Tragedy, and he notes that Burckhardt, whom he calls the profoundest connoisseur (Kenner) of Greek culture then living, afterwards added to his Cultur der Griechen [the published title is Griechische Kulturgeschichte] a section on the phenomenon, with the implication that Burckhardt had been more or less influenced by him. I may add that Nietzsche's intimate friend, with whom, however, he eventually had a falling out, Erwin Rohde, developed a similar view, with great wealth of scholarly detail in his Psyche, published after Nietzsche's collapse and with no reference to him.
b See North American Review, August, 1915, p. 202; cf. letters to Deussen and Peter Gast, Briefe, I, 536; IV, 426.
c See Freiherr von Seydlitz's article, Neue deutsche Rundschau, June, 1899, p. 622.
d Cf . Lou Andreas-Salomé (Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, p. 16) on loneliness and suffering as two great features of Nietzsche's destiny, which became more strongly marked as he approached his end, and were at once a necessity and a choice. On his early loneliness, see letters to Erwin Rohde from Leipzig and Basel (1869), Briefe, II, 135, 156.
e Cf. the lines from "Aus hohen Bergen," appended to Beyond Good and Evil:
"Ihr alten Freunde! Seht! Nun blickt ihr bleich,
Voll Lieb' und Grausen!
Nein, geht! Zürnt nicht! Hier—könntet ihr nicht hausen:
Hier zwischen fernsten Eis- und Felsenreich—
Hier muss man Jäger sein und gemsengleich."
f Nietzsche's wish to communicate himself, to be heard (if not for disciples in the literal sense) appears in Werke, XIV, 355-6, 381, 393. He even expresses a wish for disciples in a letter to Peter Gast, August 26, 1883, and speaks of his writings as bait which he had used to this end. His longing for friends, who should really share his thoughts, is touchingly evidenced in "Aus hohen Bergen," appended to Beyond Good and Evil.
g Nietzsche says (in a letter to Brandes, November 29, 1888), that he writes in Ecce Homo with "Cynismus"—i.e., cold-blooded indifference to what others will think of him. He also says (to Gast, November 26, 1888) that the book is full of jokes and malice (reich an Scherzen und Bosheiten) .
h At this point Emily Hamblen is mistaken in her excellent little book, Friedrich Nietzsche and his New Gospel, p. 11. It is the general impression—cf. A. G. Gardiner, "In the end Nietzsche became his own Superman. His autobiographical Ecce Homo was a grotesque exaltation of his own achievements, etc." (The War Lords, p. 257) .
i I omit discussion of the claims about his books, his style, his discovery of the significance of Dionysus in Greek life and the meaning of the tragic—also about himself as a psychologist and the moral quality of his thinking. To consider some of them to any purpose would require more knowledge than I possess. As to Ecce Homo, the reader will consult profitably Raoul Richter's chapter, "Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, ein Dokument der Selbsterkenntniss und Selbstverkenntniss," in his Essays.
j The present war shows perhaps nothing more clearly than that national or racial feelings are now the dominant ones in mankind—a human aim does not yet exist (cf., on this point, later, p. 344).
k A translation of Brandes' early epoch-making essay, "Aristocratic Radicalism" (1889) , appears with other matter in a volume, Friedrich Nietzsche (London and New York, 1914). Karl Joël seems to leave out of account these constant ideas or tendencies in speaking of Nietzsche's impulse to change in the way he does (op. cit., pp. 169, 320, 329). I may add that Lou Andreas-Salomé finds as constant his views on (or at least his sense of problems as to) the Dionysiac, decadence, the unseasonable (Unzeitgemäss), and the culture of genius.
l See letter to Brandes, Briefe, III, 322; Werke, 327, § 800. Cf. Ecce Homo, II, § 3; The Antichristian, § 5. A special monograph, "Pascal et Nietzsche," by Henry Bauer, with an introduction by Henri Lichtenberger, appeared in the Revue Germanique, January, 1914.
CHAPTER IV
a Cf. Ludwig Stein, Deutsche Rundschau, March, 1893, p. 402; M. A. Mügge, Nietzsche, His Life and Works, ix; Nietzsche's Werke (pocket ed.), III, XIV.
b So Lou Andreas-Salomé, op. cit., p. 8.
c All is contained in Vols. I, IX, X of the 8vo ed. and the greater part in Vols. I, II, of the pocket ed. As to the mental history of Nietzsche before the date of The Birth of Tragedy, see E. Windrath's Friedrich Nietzsches geistige Entwicklung bis zur Entstehung der Geburt der Tragödie (Beilage zum Jahresbericht, 1912-3, des H. Herz Gymnasium, Hamburg, 1913).
d "Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sect. 3; cf. a later remark, Dawn of Day, § 244. Nietzsche once puts it strongly, "An indiscriminate impulse for knowledge is like an indiscriminate sexual impulse—a sign of commonness"!
e He uses the terms "Richter," "Gesetzgeber," "Wertmesser"—cf . "Schopenhauer as Educator," sects. 3 and 6. Later we shall find him conjecturing that the original meaning of "Mensch" was "one who measures."
f "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 3. Cf. an implied definition in Human, All-too-Human, § 436, "one who has chosen for his task the most general knowledge and the valuation of existence as a whole." Later, when he comes to read existence in terms of change and becoming, he defines philosophy as "the most general form of history, as an attempt to describe somehow the Heraclitean becoming and to abbreviate it in sign-language, to translate it, as it were, into a sort of ostensible being and give it a name" (quoted by Meyer, op. cit., pp. 579, 580). Nietzsche remarks, "To make philosophy purely a matter of science (like Trendelenburg) is to throw the musket into the corn-field" (Werke, X, 299, § 55).
g Cf . the manner in which the philosopher, and Heraclitus in particular, are spoken of, "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 8; note also the tone of Werke, X, 299, § 56.
h The "horrible (entsetzliche) struggle for existence" is often referred to; cf. Werke, IX, 146. See Dorner's general representation of Nietzsche's view on this point (op. cit., 189-91).
i Cf. Birth of Tragedy, sect. 16 ("eternal life"), sect. 17 ("another world"), sect. 21 ("another being"); "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 5 ("something beyond our individual existence"). I have elaborated this view and some of its consequences in an article, "An Introductory Word on Nietzsche," Harvard Theological Review, October, 1913.
j He dissents from the view of Socrates and the rationalism that followed in his wake, proceeding as it did on the theory that man can not only know, but can correct existence (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 15; cf. the interpretation of Hamlet's inability to act, sect. 7); he also remarks on the unfortunate consequences in modern times of the idea that all may be happy on the earth (sect. 18), and says in speaking of the effort to help out nature and correct the rule of folly and mischance, "It is, to be sure, a striving that leads to deep and heartfelt resignation, for what and how much can be bettered, whether in particular or in general!" ("Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 3) .
k Cf. a memorandum, "When Friedrich August Wolf asserted the necessity of slavery in the interests of a culture, it was one of the strong thoughts of my great predecessor, which others are too feeble to lay hold of" (Werke, IX, 268, § 216).
l That genuine art does not spring from instincts for luxury, and that a new birth of it in the modern world is to be expected rather from a society freed from luxury, is asserted in Werke, X, 459, § 367 (here Nietzsche refers to the idea of the curse of gold which underlies Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen "). Art undergoes degeneration when it is a means of diversion simply (Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24). Nietzsche draws a satirical picture of the modern arts and of the society that calls for them, in "Richard Wagner at Bayreuth," sect. 8. All the same he admits that art is not for the time of actual struggle (ibid., sect. 4).
m C. W. Super, International Journal of Ethics, January, 1913, p. 178.
n This in lectures at Basel, as reported by Malwida von Meysenbug, Der Lebensabend einer Idealisten, p. 50.
o A later observation of Nietzsche's is of interest in this connection: "Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The most unhappy and melancholy animal is, as is reasonable, the cheerfullest " (Will to Power, § 91). Nietzsche thinks that the current impression of Greek cheerfulness comes largely by way of Christianity, which encountered a decadent Greece and was offended by its lightness and superficiality. This kind of "cheerfulness," however, was a poor counterpart to the high serenity of men like Æschylus, and the determining influence in it was the masses, or old-time slaves, who wished for little else than enjoyment and felt no responsibilities, being without either great memories or great hopes (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 11). The great epoch of Greece to Nietzsche's mind was from Hesiod to Æschylus (see Joël's discussion of the subject in op. cit., pp. 297-315). In English the general view of Nietzsche and Burckhardt finds expression in W. L. Courtney's The Idea of Tragedy (1900). There are echoes of Burckhardt's view in W. G. Sumner's Folkways, pp. 104-5.
p Nietzsche remarks on the contrast between a chorus of Apollo, in which the maidens preserve their separate identity and keep their civil names, and a dithyrambic chorus of Dionysus, in which each one's civic connection and social position are entirely forgotten (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 8) .
q See the wonderful description, half picture and half interpretation, of the Dionysus festival (Birth of Tragedy, close of sect. 1); cf. Erwin Rohde's Psyche, II, 17 n.
r Cf., in this connection, Walter Pater, Greek Studies, pp. 41-3, 36; Erwin Rohde, op. cit., II, 116 n.; Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., art. "Dionysus"; J. A. Symonds, The Greek Poets, II, 145-6.
s Rites and ceremonies which we should regard as coming under the head of sexual excesses seem to have characterized the beginnings of the Dionysus worship in Greece, as they did the celebrations in oriental countries from which the worship originally came; but in time the Greek worship became a more chastened thing.
t Birth of Tragedy, beginning of sect. 17. Nietzsche thinks that this Dionysiac experience has been widespread in the world (though of course under other names), that in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds ever increasing in number were borne from place to place under the same impulse (the St. John's and St. Vitus' dancers being kindred to the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks), that the phenomena can be traced back as far as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea—and he adds, with reference to those who dismiss them as "folk-diseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by a consciousness of their own superior health, that they do not surmise what a cadaverous and ghostly aspect their very "health" presents, when the glowing light of the Dionysian revelers rushes past them (ibid., sect. 1).
u Nietzsche even says that from the nature of art as ordinarily conceived (Apollinic art), tragic art cannot be honestly derived, the pleasure connected with the latter being pleasure in the annihilation of beautiful forms, even the fairest, while Apollinic art strives (by its appropriate means, picture and story) to eternalize them. Tragedy and music alike are born of another realm. See The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 16 and 25. Meyer remarks that it is doubtful whether Dionysus can be described as a "Kunstgott": "he became that first for Nietzsche" (op. cit., p. 248).
v Nietzsche draws attention to Euripides' description in the "Bacchæ" of Archilochus (the first lyric, as contrasted to epic, poet among the Greeks), who, a drunken reveler, sinks down and falls asleep on the high mountains under the midday sun, when the dream-god comes to him and touches him with the laurel—as if to show that the lyric (i.e., essentially Dionysiac) outpourings of love and hate, though so different from the calm and measured movements of epic art, may yet win Apollinic consecration (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 6).
w This particularly holds of the first great tragic dramatist, Æschylus. As to the ancient view of Æschylus as Dionysus-inspired (the view, e.g., of Pausanias, Athenaeus, and Quintilian), see Symonds, op. cit., I, 373-4. Plato regarded poetic inspiration as akin to madness ("Phædrus"); "all good poets compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed" ("Ion"), the analogy in "Ion" being the behavior of Bacchantes under the influence of Dionysus. Symonds cites the phrase "con furie," with which Italians sometimes describe the manner of production of a Tintoretto or a Michael Angelo (op. cit., II, 394-5).
x Nietzsche remarks on the different type of language used by the characters in the dialogue from that of the chorus—it is clear, firm, almost like that of Homer, i.e., Apollinic, not turgid, glowing, Dionysiac (Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 8). Symonds appears to note the same contrast (without giving it this interpretation), in saying, "When the Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote their iambics in pure Attic, but they preserved a Dorian tone in their choruses " (op. cit., I, 305) .
CHAPTER V
a "Matter itself is only given as sensation" (Werke, 1st ed., X, 429); this after saying that the development of matter into a thinking subject is "impossible." Cf. the comment on Democritus' "enormous petitio principii" (ibid., X, 114). I cannot locate these passages in the second edition of the Werke, from which I ordinarily quote.
b It is not contradictory to this when Nietzsche speaks, as he sometimes does, of picturing (vorstellen) as an action of the brain—this is merely a part of the ordinary empirical view of things; cf. the guarded language as to Anaxagoras, in "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 15, and also the express statement, "The sensation is not the result of the cell, but the cell is the result of the sensation, i.e., an artistic projection, an image" (Werke, IX, 194).
c I have indicated some of the main points of Schopenhauer's metaphysics in the following articles: "Schopenhauer's Type of Idealism" (The Monist, January, 1911), "Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism" (Philosophical Review, March, 1910), "Schopenhauer's Contact with Theology" (Harvard Theological Review, July, 1911).
d Nietzsche speaks of the "Ur-Einen" repeatedly in The Birth of Tragedy; the subjectivity of time and space, hence of succession and number, is also asserted in "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 201-2).
e The feeling comes to expression repeatedly in The Birth of Tragedy; also in "Schopenhauer as Educator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth."
f This view makes the background of The Birth of Tragedy (see particularly sects. 4 and 5). Cf. also Werke, IX, 192-4; XII, 169, § 349; and the "Attempt at Self-criticism," prefixed to the later edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche appears to think that the World-Will projects space and time with the picture, so that these forms are not, strictly speaking, merely our own (cf. an express remark, Werke, IX, 107, § 64). As stated in the quotation made in the text, we may divine our real nature as projections of the World-Will, figures in his dream, but it is no more necessary that we should do so, than that the painted warriors on a canvas should be conscious of the battle in which they there take part (Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 5). It appears that Nietzsche had speculative moods even as a boy. "At the age of twelve, I thought out for myself a wonderful Trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My reasoning was that God, thinking of himself, created the second person of the God-head; but that, in order to be able to think of himself, he had to think of his antithesis, and so create him.—In this way, I began philosophizing" (Werke, XIV, 347, § 201).
g Since though the world is a picture, not a reality, and has only an illusory being (Schein), like figures in a dream, it springs from the deepest need of its Creator as a suffering being, Nietzsche finds the will to illusion deeper, "more metaphysical," than the will to truth; it is, indeed, just the truth or reality (i.e., itself) that the World-Will wants to get away from (and does get away from in turning itself into a picture to contemplate). And it is the same desire for an illusory picture-world that gives birth, he holds, to art in man (see the "Preface to Richard Wagner" prefixed to The Birth of Tragedy, where art is called the "true metaphysical activity of life". The will to truth comes thus to be in a way anti-natural: "to will to know, when it is just illusion that is the redemptive thing (die Erlösung)—what an inversion"! See Werke, XIV, 366, § 236; 369, § 240 (these being later comments on The Birth of Tragedy). Not only is it naive to think that we can get out of the world of illusion, but, if it were possible, the escape would be undesirable: life in illusion is the goal. Nietzsche accordingly calls his philosophy an inverted Platonism—the further we get from real being, the better, fairer, purer (Werke, IX, 109, § 168; X, 160, § 126; IX, 190, § 133).
h Cf. the striking language of C. J. Keyser, "Not in the ground of need, not in bent and painful toil, but in the deep-centered play-instinct of the world, in the joyous mood of the eternal Being, which is always young, science has her origin and root" ("Mathematics," a pamphlet) . The peculiarity of Nietzsche's view is that he assigns a motive to the play, viz., dissatisfaction and pain. The idea of the world as a dream or play or game, and of ourselves as figures or players in it (cf. Werke, XIII, 207, § 471; 282, § 685) appears also in J. H. Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. IV, p. 221. Newman, however, distinguished "our real eternal existence" from this temporal form, while to Nietzsche, as to Schopenhauer, "real eternal existence" belongs to the "World-Will" alone.
i I confess that I can make no sense out of such a view. The thought of pain is of course different from pain itself (as different as any thought is from an experience), but that pain may be in itself something different from what we feel is to me a proposition without meaning—pain is feeling and nothing else (which is not saying that it may not have physiological or other conditions, which are not pain). Cf. William James, "No one pretends that pain as such only appears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mental experience is only to appear to some one" (A Pluralistic Universe, p. 198; as to feeling in general, see his Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 151) . One may question whether Nietzsche's view was not a logical inference rather than a direct observation.
j The fragment appears in Nietzsche's Briefe, I, 343 ff. Cf. the letters to von Gersdorff (1866), ibid., p. 49; to Paul Deussen, ibid., p. 101; and Richter's general account of the matter, op. cit., pp. 152-3; also Richter's reference to the subject in his Der Skepticismus in der Philosophie, II, 463-4.
k Friedrich Rittelmeyer thinks that Nietzsche continued to hold to the main points of the Schopenhauerian metaphysics for five years after the "Critique of the Schopenhauerian Philosophy," his criticism being directed only to details (Friedrich Nietzsche und das Erkenntnissproblem, pp. 7, 8).
l It is difficult here to get the right word. Nietzsche repeats Schopenhauer's views as to the inapplicability of the category of "causality" in this connection (Werke, X, 193), and yet his constant underlying presupposition is that there are things outside ourselves, which in some way affect us. We receive (empfangen) the stimuli (Reisse)—this is the way in which he always speaks.
m Cf. Helmholtz, "So far as the characteristic quality of our sensation informs of the peculiar nature of the outer influence that excites it, it may pass as a sign of it, but not as a copy.… A sign need have no sort of resemblance to that of which it is the sign. The relation between the two consists simply in the fact that the same object under the same conditions elicits the same sign" (Physiologische Optik, § 26).
n F. H. Bradley, in his Principles of Logic, protested against the reduction of the universe to an "unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," and Schopenhauer still earlier had referred to Hegel's "Ballet der Selbstbewegung der Begriffe" (Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 34) .
o Nietzsche had perhaps noted Schiller's line, "Wage du zu irren und zu traumen," which Lange quotes (Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 513). Schiller had also said,
"Nur der Irrthum ist das Leben
Und das Wissen ist der Tod."
p If the ordinary person replies to Bishop Berkeley's arguments about matter, "It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says," he is quite right: it is no matter—to him, and he probably does better to keep to his instinctive views.
q Cf. a passage in William James's Principles of Psychology, I, 288-9, ending, "Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one of a million alike imbedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the mind of eel, cuttle-fish, or crab!"
CHAPTER VI
a Cf. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 1, as to what education may do: while it cannot change the "wahre Ursinn und Grundstoff" of our being, it may free it of weeds, rubbish, and vermin, bring it light and air and rain, and so complete the work of stepmotherly nature.
b Cf. the statement of his four rules of controversial warfare in Ecce Homo, I, § 7. The passage, though written much later, throws such an important light on his general psychology and history that I quote it in full: "War is another matter. I am warlike in my way. To attack is one of my instincts. Ability to be hostile, hostility—this perhaps presupposes a strong nature, in any case it is conditioned in the make-up of every strong nature. Such a nature needs oppositions, consequently it seeks opposition: aggressive pathos belongs as necessarily to strength as revengefulness and rancor (Rach- und Nachgefühl) to weakness. Woman for example, is revengeful: it goes with her weakness, as does also her sensibility to others' needs.—The strength of the aggressor has a kind of measure in the opposition he needs: all growth shows itself in the seeking out of a powerful opponent—or problem; for a philosopher, who is warlike, challenges also problems to a duel. The task is to overcome, not oppositions in general, but those which require the enlistment of all one's force, suppleness, and mastery in arms—equal opponents. Equality with the enemy—first presupposition of an honest duel. Where one despises, one can not wage war; where one commands, where one sees something beneath one, one has no war to wage.—My war-practice may be summed up in four propositions. First, I attack only those things that are victorious—on occasion I wait till they are victorious. Second, I attack only things against which I should find no allies, where I stand alone—where I compromise myself alone.… I have never taken a step publicly, which did not compromise me: that is my criterion of right acting. Third, I never attack persons,—I use the person only as a strong magnifying-glass, by which to make a general, but elusive and impalpable evil visible. So I attacked David Strauss, more exactly the success of an old man's weak book in the circles of German 'culture'—I thereby caught this culture in the act.… So I attacked Wagner, more exactly the falseness, the mongrel instincts (die Instinkt-Halbschlächtigkeit) of our culture which confuses the super-refined with the opulent, the latest with the great. Fourth, I attack only things where every personal difference is excluded, where there is no background of sorry experiences. On the contrary, attacking is with me a proof of good will, and, on occasion, of gratitude. I honor, I distinguish, when I connect my name with that of a cause, a person: for or against—it is all the same. When I make war on Christianity, this is allowable, because I have had nothing unfortunate and obstructive from that quarter—the most earnest Christians have ever been kindly disposed to me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de rigueur, am far from charging to the individual what is the fatal result of past ages."
c It must be admitted that later on—in his second period—Nietzsche does occasionally use "Selbstsucht" in a eulogistic sense. His attitude then becomes one of sweeping criticism toward his early views, and particularly toward whatever could be regarded as high-flown and extravagant,—and he puts a certain selfishness at the root of all actions. All the same, he admits that there are different kinds and grades of it, and in connection with Siegfried speaks of "der höchsten Selbstsucht" (using "Selbstigkeit" a few lines further on—see Joyful Science, § 99). On the other hand, even "Selbstisch" is used with an unfavorable shade of meaning in Mixed Opinions etc., § 91.
CHAPTER VII
a What would be possible if all men's needs were met by the direct bounty of nature (as is sometimes supposed to be the case in tropical regions), or if machinery could take the place of labor, is another question. Nietzsche recognizes the higher uses of machinery, and in general takes a somewhat broader view of the subject later on (see pp. 133, 440).
b See J. E. Cabot's A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 450. No doubt other motives co-operated in leading Emerson to make the experiment, but I think that the one mentioned in the text was the underlying one.
CHAPTER VIII
a The connection which music may have with a man's deeper mood and attitude to life as a whole is shown in an avowal made by Schumann to Mendelssohn after hearing the latter play one of Bach's chorals: "Were life deprived of all trust, of all faith, this simple choral would restore all to me."
b Whether Wagner really held to the full Nietzschean (Schopenhauerian) view of the relation of words to music is open to question, but Nietzsche thought so at this time. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, sect. 16; "Richard Wagner etc.," sects. 5, 8, 9; Genealogy of Morals, III, § 5.
c All this is important to bear in mind in connection with Nietzsche's later criticism of Wagner (particularly in "The Case of Wagner"), of which, for reasons of space, I shall not be able to give any detailed account.
d He wrote to Erwin Rohde, January 28, 1872, "I have closed an alliance with Wagner. You can have no idea how near we are now to one another, and how our plans fit together" (Briefe, II, 285).
e A "Culturgeschichte des griechischen Volkes," in which all his philological studies were to culminate. He returned to the idea in 1875, planning systematic courses of lectures to cover seven years. See Richter, op. cit., p. 57.
f Ziegler says that Nietzsche was ready to give up his professorship for this purpose (op. cit., p. 65; cf. Drews, op. cit., p. 159; Richter, op. cit., p. 58 n.), and Drews adds that he had some idea of founding a new kind of educational institution (op. cit., pp. 45-6). We find him speaking in "We Philologists" of establishing a great center for the production of better men as the task of the future, and of educating the educators for such work—although the first ones must educate themselves, and it was for these he wrote (Werke, X, 415-9). Cf. Ernst Weber, Die pädagogishen Gedanken des jungen Nietzsche, im Zusammenhang mit seiner Welt- und Lebens-Anschauung.
g The offense given to purely philological circles by The Birth of Tragedy found marked expression in Wilamowitz-Möllendorf's Zukunftsphilologie, Eine Erwiderung auf Friedrich Nietzsches Geburt der Tragödie. To this Erwin Rohde replied with another brochure, Afterphilologie, Bendschreiben eines Philologen an Richard Wagner—Wagner having come to the defense of Nietzsche in a public letter. See the summary of the controversy in Richter, op. cit., pp. 43-4.
h This, however, was not printed at the time, being regarded by Wagner circles as not sufficiently diplomatic (see Briefe, IIa, 217 ff., where it is given, and Richter, op. cit., p. 43) .
i Nietzsche had complained, Easter, 1873, that the Germans were not subscribing to the Bayreuth project, and to the question Why? he answered that the educated Philistine (Bildungs-Philister) had become contented, and had lost the sense for what was great. Strauss was a typical representative of the new state of mind, and this was the principal reason for the attack on him. See Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxxii-iii.
j Paul Elmer More disposes of the break—"quarrel," as he terms it—very simply: it was at bottom due to "the clashing of two insanely jealous egotisms" (Nietzsche, p. 75).
k It is possible, even probable, that Nietzsche was unjust to Wagner in this interpretation; see Richter's admirable account of the whole matter, op. cit., p. 52 flf.; also Drews' discriminations, op. cit., p. 188 ff.
l As to the real Wagner, see Henri Lichtenberger's two books, Wagner (in the series, "Les Maîtres de la Musique") , and Richard Wagner, Poète et Penseur. Rare sympathy and understanding for both Nietzsche and Wagner mark this author's writings. See also Edouard Schure's article in the Revue des deux mondes, August 15, 1895.
m In a late letter to Strindberg he even speaks—confusedly, we must think—of illness as leading to a cessation of the relations with Wagner (see North American Review, August, 1913, p. 195).
CHAPTER IX
a See the warning addressed to young readers, Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 442, § 19.
b Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 211; also Lou Andreas-Salomé's remarks on the general character of this period, op. cit., p. 90.
c August Horneffer (Nietzsche als Moralist und Schriftsteller, p. 22) thinks that moral criticism (moralische Bedenken) was really Nietzsche's starting point, citing Nietzsche's own language in the preface, § 3, to Genealogy of Morals, but that he did not venture to follow the impulse at first, owing to aversion to the subject in the circles about him and the indifference of the general public to the older moralists of that type—a contributory factor being that his own thoughts were not ripe and had no definite direction. Accordingly, when later, i.e., with the period we are now considering, he appeared as a moralist, all the world was surprised and disgusted.
d He echoes Goethe's estimate of reason and science as the highest capacity of man (Human, etc., § 265) . Nothing is more urgent than knowing, and keeping oneself continuously in condition to do so thoroughly (ibid., § 288). See in particular the remarks on the scientific man of the type of Aristotle (ibid., § 264) .
e This perhaps not entirely from lack of will. Later on, as we shall see, he planned an extensive course of study in the natural sciences, and he now remarks that every one ought to master at least one science thoroughly, so as to know what scientific method means and how necessary is the utmost circumspection—recommending this especially to women (Human, etc., 635). Perhaps an exception should be made to the language of the text, so far as Nietzsche had specialized in Greek philology. Had he remained faithful to this specialty and not been drawn into the general field of philosophy and ethics, he might have produced something of the first rank in it. Richter says, "I am convinced that had Nietzsche held on to philology and his professional work, he might have become an historian of Greek culture in great style and of great authority" (op. cit., p. 58).
f Cf. Nietzsche's own language on the hesitating, intermediate character of this period, Dawn of Day, § 30.
g Nietzsche, however, speaks of the friendly extravagance of the inscription (letter to Rohde, Briefe, II, 549) .
h Nietzsche writes to Rohde in the above-mentioned letter (of June, 1878): "By the way, always seek out myself in my book [Human, All-too-Human] and not friend Rée. I am proud to have discovered his splendid qualities and intentions, but he has not had the slightest influence on the conception of my 'philosophia in nuce'; this was finished and in good part committed to paper, when I made his nearer acquaintance in the autumn of 1876" [perhaps the word "conception" is significant, the statement not being really inconsistent with indebtedness to Rée for help in detail]. An account of the intellectual relations of Nietzsche to Rée is given in the preface (§ 4; cf. § 7) to Genealogy of Morals. Wagner did not like Rée, who was a Jew, and warned Nietzsche in Sorrento against him (see Drews, op. cit., p. 221). Richter has an extended discriminating note on the relations between Nietzsche and Rée (op. cit., pp. 163-4).
i Ziegler appears to me to exaggerate when he speaks of a "ganz fundamentale Wandlung" (op. cit., p. 76); he says later himself that the change was "angebahnt." Riehl speaks simply of a "grosse Loslösung" (op. cit., p. 59). There can be no doubt that the change appeared great, even to those who knew Nietzsche well (cf. what Rohde wrote, as quoted in Bernoulli's Franz Overbeck und Nietzsche, I, 261).
CHAPTER X
a Cf. a striking passage quoted by Riehl (op. cit., p. 68) which I cannot locate: "How strong the metaphysical need is … may be gathered from the fact that even when a free man has got rid of all metaphysical belief, art in its highest manifestations easily causes a reverberation (Miterklingen) of the long silent or even broken metaphysical strings. If one becomes conscious of this, one feels a deep twinge of the heart and longs for a return of the object he has lost, whether it be called religion or metaphysics. In such moments a man's intellectual character is put to the proof."
b Cf. Dawn of Day, § 540, where he even calls it a piece of pedantry to distinguish between learning by study and natural endowment, though he admits that Michael Angelo distinguished in this way (in contrasting Raphael with himself), and that learning is not altogether a matter of will: one must be able to learn.
c In Mixed Opinions etc., § 213, however, Nietzsche gives precedence in education to drawing and painting over music; and in The Wanderer etc., § 167, he has other depreciatory references to music, even saying that the Greeks gave it a secondary place—that is, aside from the Pythagoreans, who invented the five-year silence and did not invent dialectics—something for which he now has more respect than in his first period. This view of the Greeks, if at all reconcilable with his earlier view, is only so if he has the later (decadent) Greeks in mind, or at least the Greeks, so far as they loved discussion and strife.
d Cf. Human, etc., § 292, "No honey is sweeter than that of knowledge"; this aphorism closes with the ejaculation, "Toward the light—thy last movement; an exultant cry of knowing—thy last sound." On the other hand, Nietzsche is not unaware of the losses or dangers to which men of science are subject—on the side of active will they are apt to be weakened, and they may lose their highest power and bloom earlier than the poetic natures (Mixed Opinions etc., § 206).
e Cf. another description of one who has a "free" mind about life (Human, etc., § 287): though at first he loves and hates, and forgets nothing, he comes in time neither to hate existence nor to love it, but to lie above it, now with the eye of joy, now with that of sorrow, like nature herself with her alternating summer and autumn moods.
f Cf. the picture of the "Don Juan of Knowledge," Dawn of Day, § 327: the objects he gains fail to hold his love, but he enjoys the adventure, the pursuit, and the intrigues; he pursues the highest and remotest stars of knowledge, till at last there is nothing more to seek, unless it be the abode of pain, and perhaps even that will disappoint him like everything else. Even during Nietzsche's student days at Bonn, he had written his sister (June 11, 1865), "Do we then in our study seek rest, peace, happiness? No, only truth, and even if it were in the highest degree horrible and ugly" (Briefe, V, 113).
g Cf. the striking description of the manner of life of one who devotes himself to knowledge, Human, etc., § 291. Nietzsche thinks it new in history to make knowledge something more than a means—even among the Greeks it was a means to virtue, as among Christians a means to the soul's salvation (Joyful Science, § 123).
h Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 369: "There is a weariness of the finest and more cultivated minds, for whom the best that earth offers has become empty." See also, in the course of study of the psychology of the Apostle Paul, the appreciation of the religious idealism of ancient Israel, Dawn of Day, § 68. As to the lack of intellectual warrant, however, for the positions of religion, see Human, etc., §§ 110, 111, and the extreme statements of Dawn of Day, §§ 95, 464.
i Nietzsche is sometimes scarcely just either to religion or to metaphysics, showing, for instance, a strange lack of comprehension (strange particularly for one who knew Schopenhauer) of the Christian "Seelennoth," which sighs over inner corruption and craves salvation (Human, etc., § 27; Dawn of Day, § 57); he even speaks of the flattening and externalizing of the religious life which followed in the wake of the Renaissance as something to be looked upon with joy (Human, etc., § 237) . However, in another passage, "In honor of the homines religiosi" (Joyful Science, § 350), he virtually qualifies the last-named judgment, saying that the struggle against the church was partly the struggle of the commoner, more self-satisfied, and superficial natures against the graver and deeper ones.
j See a wonderful passage continuing this line of thought (Joyful Science, § 277) , and concluding, "In fact something plays with us now and then—dear accident: it takes us on occasion by the hand, and the wisest Providence could conceive no more beautiful music than our foolish hand succeeds in making."
k A legitimate use of the term "soul" is as covering those inner motions which come easy to one and hence are accomplished gladly and with grace; a man passes as soulless when these motions come hard and with effort (Dawn of Day, § 311). On the "soul" as an inner quantity in general, see Genealogy etc., II, § 16.
l Compare a similar view, worked out with convincing thoroughness, by the late Edmund Montgomery in his Philosophical Problems in the Light of Vital Organization. Nietzsche has interesting comments on dreams as interpretations of bodily, particularly nervous states (Human, etc., § 13; Dawn of Day, § 119; Will to Power, § 479); if the dreams change, the conditions being the same, it is because varying impulses are in turn dominant in us (Joyful Science, § 119). Will, in the conscious sense, is, equally with consciousness in general, a secondary phenomenon (Dawn of Day, § 124). At the same time he seems to regard something akin to thought as belonging to the very nature of man, making the singular statement, "Man, like every living creature, thinks continually, but does not know it" (Meyer, op. cit., p. 359, quotes this from Joyful Science, but I cannot place it; cf. note gg, p. 500 of this volume).
m The contrasted requisites for describing and explaining are mentioned in Dawn of Day, § 428. Apparently Nietzsche held to the a priori nature of the causal idea—at least Joyful Science, § 98, looks that way.
n It must be admitted that an express and clear reconciling statement (such as one finds, for example, in Montgomery's book just alluded to) Nietzsche does not make.
CHAPTER XI
a Nietzsche also differs from Kant and Schopenhauer in that while they accept the feeling of responsibility at its face value, and argue unhesitatingly from it as a premise to free will as a conclusion, he subjects the feeling to critical scrutiny. See particularly Human, etc., § 39, and Richter's comments (op. cit., p. 177).
b Cf., for example, chap, ix of J. Cotter Morison's Service of Man. Nietzsche's attitude is also much like Spinoza's; cf. Genealogy of Morals, II, § 15, and Richter, op. cit., pp. 347-8.
c How impulses of praise and blame arise is interestingly, if one-sidedly, set forth in Dawn of Day, § 140.
d Cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, § 16; Twilight of the Idols, I, § 10; Will to Power, §§ 233, 235. Emerson's remark may be quoted, "The less we have to do with our sins the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions" ("Swedenborg" in Representative Men).
e This is a later statement (Zarathustra, II, xx), but in harmony with the view now. The analysis made of revenge there is interesting: we are impotent to change the injury since it belongs to the past, and yet we wish to assert our power and get even with it, and so we inflict pain, i.e., do a senseless thing rather than nothing.
f Cf. a later reference to Plato's "Timaeus" (Werke, XIV, 318, § 154): "very interesting is Plato's 'Timaeus,' p. 86: mental illness occasioned by a defective state of the body; the task of educators and states is to heal at this point. If the cure is not accomplished in time, educators and states, not the sick, to be held responsible."
g Cf., on this general subject, Dietrich H. Kerler's Nietzsche und die Vergeltungsidee (zur Strafrechtsreform).
h Richter (op. cit., p. 177) notes that these motives are now treated as interchangeable by Nietzsche, though they are so different. Pleasure (in the broad elastic sense) is undoubtedly the more fundamental one, and Nietzsche himself gives preservation a secondary place later on.
i Nietzsche goes far in his exaltation of reason at this time, as contrasted with the relative depreciation of it earlier. He even asks whether it is not the head that binds men together (for advantage), and the heart (blind gropings of love and hate) that sunders them (Mixed Opinions etc., § 197; cf. The Wanderer etc., § 41). "Besonnenheit" is called the virtue of virtues (The Wanderer etc., § 294; cf. § 189). He questions whether feelings are the original element in us, suggesting that judgments often lie behind them, though this may be forgotten and the feelings pass on as instinctive inheritances; so temperament in many men may owe its origin to good or bad intellectual habits—if not in themselves, then in their ancestors (Dawn of Day, §§ 247, 35). Once he admits, however, that aversion may be more ultimate than the reasons given for it (ibid., § 358). See on the subject, Riehl, op. cit., p. 65; Richter, op. cit., p. 178.
j Occasionally (e.g. Human, etc., § 49) Nietzsche refers to "unegoistic" impulses, and this leads Ziegler (op. cit., p. 86) to the view that he recognized a double source of human action; but in such cases, I take it, he simply relapses into ordinary methods of speech. In Human, etc., § 48, after using the term "unegoistic," he says that the word is never to be understood strictly, but simply as a convenient form of expression (eine Erleichterung des Ausdrucks).
k Nietzsche gives still other statements of the stages through which morality passes. For example, according to The Wanderer etc., § 44, morality was at first and at bottom a means of preserving the community or of keeping it on a certain level, the motives appealed to being fear and hope—with perhaps the added fear of an hereafter and a hell; later, it becomes the command of a God (cf. the "Mosaic law"), and later still an absolute law; at length a morality of inclination, of taste arrives—and finally one of insight, which transcends the whole circle of illusionary motives, yet is aware that for ages mankind could have had no others. See further statements in Human, etc., § 94; The Wanderer etc., § 64, and Beyond Good and Evil, § 32.
l At this time Nietzsche assigns to forgetfulness a great rôle in the development or transformation of moral conceptions. See as to justice. Human, etc., § 92, and even as to intellectual scrupulousness. Mixed Opinions etc., § 26, and generally, The Wanderer etc., § 206.
m Cf., as to motives in returning kindnesses, The Wanderer etc., § 256; in beneficence, ibid., § 253; Beyond Good and Evil, § 194; and the general irony of Dawn of Day, §§ 385, 523; Joyful Science, § 88. Nietzsche questions, however, whether vanity should be condemned to the extent that it ordinarily is (The Wanderer etc., §§ 60, 181)—see the fine analysis, with reasons why vanity should be tenderly treated, in Zarathustra, II, xxi; still he has no real love for it (Joyful Science, §§ 87, 263, 283). Instances of his irony toward moral airs and pretensions may be found in Joyful Science, §§ 27, 88, 214; Dawn of Day, §§ 310, 419—see The Wanderer etc., §§ 14, 304, as to man's taking himself as the end of existence.
In criticism of this kind, no doubt the French moralists such as Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, and Chamfort served more or less as models. He says that their writings have more real thought in them than all the books of German philosophers put together—that they continue the spirit of the Renaissance and of the Greco-Roman world (The Wanderer etc., § 214). He even has words of recognition for Helvetius (ibid., § 216), though later on he reflects on him, together with Bentham (Beyond Good and Evil, § 228) . He does not pass over Rousseau and notes his influence on Kant—Rousseau was in part the author of the moral revival which spread over Europe at the end of the eighteenth century; the revival, however, contributed little to the understanding of moral phenomena, and had rather, from this point of view, an injurious and retrogressive influence (The Wanderer etc., § 216).
n Cf. Dawn of Day, § 516, and Zarathustra's sayings, " Physician, help thyself: so dost thou help thy patient too" (Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 2); "If thou hast a suffering friend, be a resting-place to his suffering, but, as it were, a hard bed, a camp bed; so shalt thou serve him best" (ibid., II, iii).
CHAPTER XII
a Simmel (op. cit., chap, i) finds a fundamental difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in their respective attitudes to evolution as a process in time; see also Meyer's comments (op. cit., p. 275), and Nietzsche's own reference to Schopenhauer in Beyond Good and Evil, § 204.
b Schopenhauer, it may be observed, never radically changed in his philosophical views, knew no evolution—once precipitated (and at a comparatively early time in his life), the views remained fixed.
c We scarcely think of the "blessing of labor" just where it would be an unquestionable blessing, namely for one who, having inherited a competence, is without sufficient intellect to know how to use the leisure it gives (Joyful Science, § 359). The principal benefit of labor is in keeping common natures and officials, business people, soldiers, and the like, from being idle, just as it is the principal objection to socialism that it wants to create idleness for common natures—for the idle common individual becomes a burden to himself and to the world (Werke, XI, 367, § 555).
d Nietzsche's picture of the "great men of industry" may seem overdrawn and probably was not based on much personal observation, but Charles Francis Adams remarks in his recently published autobiography (Charles Francis Adams, 1835-1915: An autobiography, p. 196): "I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men—'big' financially—men famous during the last half century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. A set of mere money-makers and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting."
e Nietzsche's earliest reference (i.e., in his first, semi-metaphysical period) to the doctrines of the French Revolution was uncomplimentary—they were an un-German, superficial, and unmetaphysical philosophy of the Romanic order (Werke, IX, 161). He thinks that the Revolution would have been much tamer and no such seduction for men of intellect as it proved to be, had not Chamfort cast in his lot with it (Joyful Science, § 95; cf . § 350). He, however, speaks with unstinted admiration of Carnot, "the soldier and the republican," calling him "great, brave, simple, silent" (Dawn of Day, § 167).
f Nietzsche views democracy in other aspects on which I have not space to dwell. But I may note what he says of its influence on music. He finds German music more European than any other, since it alone reflects the changed European spirit; in Italian operas we still hear choruses of servants and soldiers, not of the people. Explicable also in this way is a kind of middle-class attitude of jealousy toward noblesse, particularly toward esprit and elegance, which is observable in German music; it is no longer music like that of Goethe's singer before the castle-gate, which pleases the hall and the king. Beethoven represents the new tendency, who, as compared with Goethe (one thinks of their encounter at Teplitz) appears like half-barbarism alongside of culture, the people alongside of the noble class. Nietzsche even raises the question whether the increasing contempt of melody among Germans is not a democratic symptom (Unart) and an after-effect of the Revolution—melody being akin to law-abidingness, as contrasted with the revolutionary spirit of change. See Joyful Science, § 103.
g Alfred Fouillée (Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, p. 11) notes that a German writer (Gistrow) has tried to make a place for Nietzsche's ideas under evolutionary socialism.
h He once goes so far as to describe the socialists as angry with the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," and wishing to have it read instead, "Thou shalt not own" (The Wanderer etc., § 285). In Human, etc., § 460, there is a picture of "the great man of the masses," which is displeasing enough. After considering in still another passage (Dawn of Day, § 188) the tendency to drunkenness among the people, he asks dubiously whether we are to intrust politics to them, and his sister tells us that he was angry with the socialist leaders because they did not contend with all their might against the excessive use of alcohol among the workers, since it was a worse enemy to them than all else which they counted hostile (Werke, pocket ed., V, xix; cf. xx).
i Nietzsche even thinks that for the time being at least culture on a military basis stands high above all so-called industrial culture—soldiers and their leaders having still a much higher relation to each other than workers and their employers; he sets down industrial culture in its present form as the lowest (gemeinste) form of existence that has ever been, expressly disagreeing with Herbert Spencer. "Here works simply the law of necessity: men want to live and have to sell themselves, but they despise the one who exploits this necessity and buys them" (Joyful Science, § 40; Werke, XI, 369, § 557).
j Even a European style of dress, as distinguished from national styles, is developing (The Wanderer etc., § 215). It is principally differences of language that prevent our perception of what is going on, which is really the vanishing of the national and the production of the European man (Werke, XI, 134, § 425). Meyer (op. cit., p. 663) remarks that Madame de Staël was the first to light upon the conception of the "European spirit."
k Carl Lory (Nietssche als Geschichtsphilosoph, p. 27) considers some of the expectations mentioned in the text fantastic; but what are they compared to a suggestion, or rather question, whether we might not succeed in controlling the movement of our planet, or in migrating, at our utmost need, to another, which is made by a presumably sober English-man? So L. T. Hobhouse's Development and Purpose, as reviewed in Mind, July, 1913, p. 384.
CHAPTER XIII
a Cf. also the spirit of Human, etc., § 291, and the description of the ideal of the philosopher's life ("poverty, chastity, humility") in Genealogy etc., III, § 8. Dr. Paneth, of Vienna, who saw Nietzsche much in Nice during the winter of 1883-4, wrote as follows of him:
"His small room is bare and inhospitable-looking; it certainly has not been chosen with a view either to ease or comfort, but solely on account of economy. It has no stove, no carpet, and no daintiness, and when I was there it was bitterly cold. Nietzsche was exceedingly friendly. There was nothing of false pathos or of the prophet about him, although I had expected it from his last work; on the contrary, he behaved in quite a harmless and natural way, and we began a commonplace conversation about the climate and dwellings. Then he told me, but without the slightest affectation or assumption, how he had always felt that a task had been laid upon him, and that he intended to perform it to the utmost of his power, as far as his eyes would permit him. Just fancy, this man lives all alone and is half blind. In the evening he can never work at anything. There are many contradictions in Nietzsche, but he is a downright honest man, and possesses the utmost strength of will and effort. I asked him whether he would like me to draw the attention of the public to him on the occasion of the third part of Zarathustra. He would not object, he said, but he did not seem to like the idea. Such a contempt for every extra aid to success, such a freedom from all self-advertisement is impressive. He is absolutely convinced of his mission, and of his future fame; this belief gives him strength to bear all his misfortunes, his bodily sufferings, even his poverty. Of one thing I am certain, Nietzsche is chiefly a man of sentiment." (I borrow the passage from Mügge's Nietzsche, His Life and Work, 3d ed., p. 74.)
b It is from the standpoint of a larger and higher idea of philosophy that he now criticises English philosophy—see the references to Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, in contrast with Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Beyond Good and Evil, § 252.
c Real philosophers are here distinguished from philosophical laborers, whose work—that of explicating and systematizing existing and past valuations—is secondary, however useful. Cf. also Will to Power, § 421.
d Nietzsche, though valuing Hegel more highly than Schopenhauer did (cf. the comments on Schopenhauer's "unintelligent rage" against him. Beyond Good and Evil, § 204) , speaks critically of his grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence with the help of the sixth sense, the "historical sense," thereby delaying the victory of the Schopenhauerian atheistic view, Joyful Science, § 357.
e He contrasts this with Romantic pessimism, such as he finds in the Schopenhauerian philosophy and in Wagnerian music. After what has been said in the text, no inconsistency will be felt, when, in claiming to be (with the possible exception of Heraclitus) the first "tragic philosopher," he adds, "that is, the extremest antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher" (Ecce Homo, III, i, § 3).
f In writing to Brandes of the new prefaces to his earlier works, he says that they may perhaps throw some light on him, "supposing that I am not dark in myself (dark in and for myself), as obscurrissimus obscurorum virorum.… This were possible" (Briefe, III, 275).
g Nietzsche's singular double attitude to the world is daringly stated in the last two lines of a verse, which may be put into rough prose thus:
"I will be wise because it pleases me to be so,
And not because anybody else commands it.
I praise God, because He made the world
As stupidly as possible."
(Werke, pocket ed., VI, 427.)
CHAPTER XIV
a I am not sure whether Will to Power, § 545, expresses a view of space inconsistent with that stated in the text or not; and whether Werke, XII, 48, § 118, also expresses a discordant view of time. On more than one ultimate metaphysical point, varying statements linger in such fragmentary notes as we have, and a final definitive word, which would put an end to our uncertainty, is lacking.
b Walther Lob deals with "eternal recurrence" from the "scientific" point of view, and presents objections to it, in the Deutsche Rundschau, November, 1908. I may add that Nietzsche regards the general mechanical view as useful for purposes of investigation and discovery, but imperfect and provisional (Will to Power, § 1066).
c Nietzsche argues that if recurrence did not take place, this would be something inexplicable by accident and a contrary intention would have to be presupposed—an intention embodied in the structure of the forces. In other words, either recurrence or an arbitrary God! See Werke, XII, 56-7, §§ 103, 105.
d I give also, with his kind permission, W. B. Smith's translation (originally printed in Poet Lore, 1905, XVI, iii, 91):
""O Man! Give ear!
What saith the midnight deep and drear?
From sleep, from sleep,
I woke and from a dream profound;—
The world is deep.
And deeper than the day can sound.
Deep is its woe—,
Joy—deeper still than heart's distress.
Woe saith. Forgo!
But joy wills Everlastingness,
Wills deep, deep Everlastingness."
e The shepherd into whose throat the serpent (the idea of "eternal recurrence ") has crawled, bites its head off at the instigation of Zarathustra and spits it out—and laughs, laughed as man has never laughed before (Zarathustra, III, ii, § 2; in xiii, § 2, it is Zarathustra who has the experience). Zarathustra chants love for eternity (III, xvi); his disciples, too, after a festival with him, are lifted up, ready to live, and to live again. "Was that life?" will I say to death, "Well! once again!" (IV, xix, § 1). I take it that not the bare idea of return, but the idea with its complex of consequences, the idea as a luminous whole, is what is referred to in the passage cited in the text.
f G. Chatterton-Hill quite misconceives Nietzsche's meaning in speaking of eternal life as wished for, "because only in eternity can the plentitude of its [life's] expansion be realized" (op. cit., p. 71).
g For example, by O. Külpe, Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland, pp. 61-2; Meyer, op. cit., p. 207; F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 67; A. Fouill6é, Revue Philosophique, LXVI (1909), p. 527.
h Nietzsche even has an early remark to the following effect: "The whole process of the world's history goes on as if free will and responsibility existed. We have here a necessary moral presupposition, a category of our action. That strict causality, which we can quite well grasp conceptually, is not a necessary category. The demands (Consequenz) of logic are inferior to the demands of the thinking which accompanies action" (Werke, IX, 188, § 129).
i See Meyer, op. cit., pp. 381 ff.; Simmel (with an apparently conclusive mathematical demonstration), op. cit., p. 250 n.; Richter (with a reference to Cantor's doctrine of the different powers of all quantities), op. cit., pp. 276, 326-7. Dorner, however, who, though not sympathetic, means to be just, and gives us, in general, criticism of Nietzsche worthy of the great theologian, appears to take a circular course of things for granted, in case there is a fixed and constant quantity of force (op. cit., p. 190).
j Vaihinger (Die Philosophie des Als Ob, p. 789 n), commenting on this remark, suggests that O. Ewald (Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grundbegriffen) and Simmel may be right in thinking that Nietzsche held to "eternal return" as a "pedagogical, regulative idea," rather than dogmatically.
k See the letter to Rohde, July 15, 1882 (Briefe, II, 566). Cf. Lou Andreas-Salomé, op. cit., pp. 140-2, 224; Richter, op cit., pp. 64, 276; Drews, op. cit., p. 326; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 132.
l A. W. Benn, says that Nietzsche "plagiarized" the doctrine from the Stoics (The Greek Philosophers, 2d ed., p. 335 n.).
m It is singular that Nietzsche does not notice what would ordinarily be counted a defect in his view, namely, that no conscious continuity between this life and the next is asserted—we do not remember our previous existence and presumably in our future state shall have no recollection of this. The average man has little concern about a future individual, who, however like him, is not himself, i.e., a continuation of his present consciousness. I can only suggest that here too Nietzsche must have judged others by himself. To him, if the lives were identical, if there was an absolute repetition of the same thing, it was of small moment whether there was a thread of memory connecting them or not. That the same commonplace thing should be eternally repeating itself—this irrespective of anything else, was what depressed him, as it was the possibility of an eternal repetition of sublime things that lifted him up. For the moment he, as it were, became pure speculative intelligence, intent only to know whether anything going on in the universe was worth while.
CHAPTER XV
a It is sometimes said that the same stimulus, applied to different sense organs, gives rise to correspondingly different sensations—so H. Wildon Carr, Philosophical Review, May, 1914, p. 257.
b Cf. the early remark before quoted: "The sensation is not the result of the cell, but the cell is the result of the sensation, i.e., an artistic projection, an image" (Werke, IX, 194). Of the complications in such a view from the physiological standpoint Nietzsche is well aware—see Beyond Good and Evil, § 15.
c Nietzsche finds nothing really unchangeable in the world of chemistry—e.g., it is superficial to say that things so different as diamond, graphite, and coal are the same, simply because they have a common chemical substance and there is no loss in weight in the process of transformation (Will to Power, § 623).
d As to the pure ideality of straight lines, circles, numbers, see Human, etc., §§ 11, 18, 19; Werke, XIV, 34, § 68; 42-3, § 81; also p. 320 (the objects of mathematics "do not exist").
e The "I" is also spoken of as an attempt to simplify our infinitely complicated nature (Werke, XI, 291, § 335), and again as the result of a doubling process, as when we say "the lightning lightens" (ibid., XIV, 329, § 164).
f Even to a theologian like Heinrich Weinel, the soul is no longer a thing, a "simple and hence imperishable substance," such as science before Kant strove to demonstrate (op. cit., p. 6). Nietzsche finds as little "one soul" as "two souls" in our breast, rather "many mortal souls" (Werke, XIV, 37, § 75).
g As to the falsity of the outer world, Nietzsche sometimes uses strong language, but it is exact from his point of view: it is a "product of fantasy," a "world of phantoms," "poetry," "the primitive poetry of mankind" (Werke, XII, 36, § 69; 170, § 351; Dawn of Day, § 118). He thinks that whatever may be our philosophical standpoint [ordinary realism he hardly considers as a philosophical standpoint], this falsity (Irrthümlichkeit) is the surest and solidest thing we can still lay hold of (Beyond Good and Evil, § 34). Riehl asks (op. cit., p. 130) how we can speak of falsity, if we do not know the truth; but one is a negative, the other a positive judgment—Nietzsche himself observes that the destruction of an illusion does not of itself give us the truth, but may simply make the field of our ignorance wider (Werke, XIII, 138, § 318; Will to Power, § 603). The illusoriness of the physical world has been often asserted, e.g., by Hume, of whom Norman Kemp Smith says, "Hume's argument rests throughout on the supposition that perishing subjective states are the only possible objects of mind, and that it is these perishing states which natural belief constrains us to regard as independent existence. Such belief is obviously, on the above interpretation, sheer illusion and utterly false" (Mind, April, 1905, pp. 169, 170). See also Ralph Barton Perry's admirable statement of Hume's view, Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 138-9. It is curious that Nietzsche refers rarely to Hume, and but twice to a critical point in his philosophy, viz., his conception of causality (Werke, XIV, 27, § 49; XVI, 51). His general view, however, might well receive the epithet, "psychologism" with which Perry characterizes Hume's view—or even a stronger and still more barbarous one, viz., "biographism," for he says, "Man may reach out as far as he will with his knowledge and seem to himself as objective as possible—in the end he gets nothing from it but his own biography" (Human, etc., § 513).
h Simplification is spoken of as "the chief need" of organic existence, Werke, XII, 46, § 83; cf. 10, § 18. On the illusion of identity, see ibid., XIV, 22, § 38; 33, § 66; 35, § 70. Nietzsche had maintained early in his career that logic rested on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world corresponds, e.g., that of the likeness of things, and that of the identity of the same thing at different points of time (Human, etc., § 11; The Wanderer etc., § 12; Werke, XI, 179, § 65).
i Error (i.e., opinions born of subjective need and posited as objective realities) is, indeed, so much in possession of the field and has become so inwrought into the human constitution, that truth, even when it is born, can hardly live save in combination with it, being too forceless of itself (Werke, XII, 47, § 85; cf. XIV, 269, § 40, where is the strong statement, "as bloom belongs to the apple, so does falsehood belong to life"). Error of a certain sort is even spoken of as a presupposition of knowledge, e.g., ideas of "being," "identity," "substance," "permanence," the "unconditioned"; they are all "logical fictions" (Werke, XII, 23, § 39; 24, § 41; 46, § 82; 48, § 89; 208, § 442; XIV, 29, § 53; 31, § 59; Beyond Good and Evil, § 4) , but at the same time standards by which we measure and judge things. Though we have discovered our errors, we are often none the less obliged to act according to them and as if we believed them (Werke, XIII, 224, § 284)—they are imbedded in language and we cannot get rid of them (Werke, XI, 180, § 69; The Wanderer etc., § 11). Nietzsche himself frequently speaks of sensible phenomena as independent realities, like the rest of us.
j Knowledge (in this sense) may be something that only the philosopher, who is conceived of as the strongest type of man, can endure; Nietzsche distinguishes between what is necessary for the philosopher and for most men (Werke, XV, 1st ed., 294 ff).
k At the same time there is a note of pathos in saying this. It appears also in the exclamation, "Ah! we must embrace untruth, and now the error becomes lie and the lie a condition of life"! (Werke, XII, 48, § 87). He had said earlier, "A question lies heavy on the tongue and does not wish to be articulate: can man consciously hold to untruth, and, if he must, is not death preferable?" (Human, etc., § 34). I need scarcely say that Nietzsche does not mean that all illusions or errors are beneficial—he notes that some may be harmful, even if they make happy for a time (cf. Will to Power, §§ 453-4).
l How far a view of this sort resembles Pragmatism, I leave to those better acquainted with the latter than I to say. René Berthelot, while remarking that Nietzsche did not know the term Pragmatism, calls him the first to perceive distinctly a great part of the ideas currently so designated (Un romantisme utilitaire, p. 33; see, however, A. W. Moore's critical comment, Philosophical Review, November, 1912, pp. 707-9). Richard Müller-Frienfels finds expressed in Nietzsche "the thoughts which have grown into a system as Pragmatism in America, as Humanism in England, and which in Germany has much that is kindred to them, above all in the biological theory of knowledge of Mach, Avenarius, Jerusalem, Simmel, Vaihinger, and others" (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, April, 1913, pp. 339-58). W. Eggenschwyler, on the other hand, emphasizes the contrasts between Nietzsche and James's views in an article, "War Nietzsche Pragmatist?" (ibid., October, 1912, pp. 35-47).
m See Will to Power, § 503, where it is said that the whole apparatus of so-called knowledge is an apparatus for abstracting and simplifying—its aim being not knowledge proper, but acquiring control. So practical interpretation is distinguished from explanation in ibid., § 604; and ordinary logic is treated as a falsifying process (proceeding as it does on the supposition of identical cases)—it does not come from a will to truth (ibid., § 512). At other times he departs from this strict conception of knowledge. In one place he even denies that there is any pure, will-less subject of knowledge (Genealogy etc., III, § 12); and in another he calls it a fatal mistake to posit a peculiar impulse to knowledge (which goes blindly after truth, without reference to advantage or injury), and then to separate from it the whole world of practical interests (Will to Power, § 423). But the inconsistencies are no greater than in his varying views of truth, and in effect correspond to them. Nietzsche does not reach a definitive position here, any more than at some other points in his thinking; in the main, however, he holds to the old theoretic meanings of knowledge and truth, simply urging that it is difficult, if not impossible, to attain knowledge and truth actually.
n Nietzsche is skeptical of the objective character of what goes by the name of history—it is more interpretation than fact (Werke, XIII, 64, § 158; XIV, 146, § 303; Philologica, I, 329).
o Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 12, where the new psychologist, after putting an end to superstition about the soul and falling into a new desert and mistrust, is described as learning at last to invent and, who knows? perhaps to find.
p Richter (op. cit., p. 282) refers to a passage (Werke, XV, 1st ed., p. 295), in which Nietzsche speaks of our not receiving, but ourselves positing sense-perceptions. But the perceptions, I take it, are to be distinguished from the stimuli (Reize) that give rise to them—the former we do produce, but the latter we receive. The point with Nietzsche is that our sensations or sense-perceptions are not impressions (hence copies, or at least as much like the original as the image which a die leaves in the wax is to the die)—that we actively create them. See Nietzsche's early discussion of the subject, summarize ante, pp. 50-1; also a late utterance quoted by Meyer (op. cit., p. 589), "In all perception … what essentially happens is an action, still more exactly an imposing of forms (Formen-Aufzwingen): only the superficial speak of 'impressions.'"
q Cf., as to deductions from moral needs, reflections on Kant, Will to Power, § 410; on Hegel, ibid., § 416; on philosophers in general, Beyond Good and Evil, § 6; Will to Power, § 412. As to conclusions from needs of happiness, comfort, etc., see Will to Power, §§ 425, 36, 171-2, 455; Beyond Good and Evil, § 210; Genealogy etc., I, § 1; III, § 24. Nietzsche even calls the "desirable" a canon without meaning in relation to the world as a totality (Will to Power, §§ 709, 711). Nor are clearness and irrefutableness really marks or standards of truth. To hold that clearness proves truth is childishness—unclear ideas may be nearer truth (ibid., § 358). As to irrefutableness, see ibid., §§ 535, 541.
r In Will to Power, § 598, the idea that there is no truth (called the nihilistic belief) is treated as a recreation for the warrior of knowledge who is ever in struggle with ugly truths—with the implication, then, that after the recreation he will go on with the struggle.
s Cf. Will to Power, § 604 (there is no datum, everything being fluid, unseizable, the most permanent thing being our opinions). In one place (Werke, XIII, 49, § 120) he even proposes—following, I imagine, the extreme views of Lange—to do away with the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves (cf. Vaihinger's summary statement of Lange's views, Die Philosophie des Als Ob, pp. 756-7).
t Cf. Dorner's happy statement of Nietzsche's view: "In this actual world there are no individuals, no species, and, strictly speaking, also no wills, but only actions and reactions, centers of action and reaction, and the word 'world' signifies only the total aspect of these actions" (op. cit., pp. 137).
u See the striking summary paragraph, Will to Power, § 567: Each center of force has its perspective for the rest of the world, i.e., its quite definite valuation and way of acting and resisting. The "apparent world" reduces itself to specific sorts of action proceeding from such centers. The "world" is only a word for the total play of such actions. Reality consists in just this particular sort of action and reaction of each individual to the whole. There hence remains no shadow of right to speak here of appearance. There is no "other," no "true," no essential being—therewith would be designated a world without action and reaction. The contrast between the apparent and the "true" world hence becomes the contrast between "world" and "nothing." Cf. also ibid., § 708 (becoming in not appearance; it is perhaps the world of being that is appearance).
v By will Nietzsche means not so much a fixed entity or faculty, as a moving point—he speaks of "Willens-Punktationen" that continually increase or lose their power (ibid., § 715). Again, though a who that feels pleasure and wills power (i.e., a single subject) is not necessary, there must be contrasts, oppositions, and so relative unities (ibid., § 693). When Nietzsche rejects will as illusion (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 19), Richter remarks that he has in mind the consciously aiming will, conceived as something simple (op. cit., p. 225). On the other hand, Nietzsche uses will distinctly in the sense of something that selects and accomplishes (Will to Power, § 662) , and expressly dissents from Schopenhauer's view of the will as desire and impulse merely—will, he says, deals with ordinary impulses as their master (ibid., §§ 84, 95, 260, 668). Still he does occasionally speak of will to power as desire (ibid., § 619). Ultimately it is neither a being or a becoming, but a pathos—from which a becoming or an action results (ibid., § 635; cf. Werke, XIII, 210, § 483).
w I am compelled to borrow here from Riehl (op. cit., p. 60). Indeed, Nietzsche still says that the view that every object seen from within is a subject, belongs to the past (Will to Power, § 474; he probably means a conscious subject, or else uses subject in the technical sense already criticised). On the other hand, in ibid., § 658, he speaks of "thinking, feeling, willing in all that lives," and in Zarathustra, IV, xi, he comes near popular animism in speaking of the pine tree as reaching after power, commanding, victorious, etc.—though the language may be taken as poetical.
x Julius Bahnsen, an early follower of Schopenhauer, seems to have had a similar view, reality being taken by him as "a living antagonism of mutually crossing forces or acts of will" (Der Widerspruch, I, 436) . The term "Voluntarism," Rudolf Eisler says, was first used by Ferdinand Tönnies in 1883, Paulsen in 1892 having brought it into currency (zur Geltung); cf. Eisler's Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, art., "Voluntarismus" Wundt's view, as stated by Külpe (Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Deutschland, 3d ed., pp. 102-3), and also the reasoning by which he arrives at it, are in general like Nietzsche's: "All ideas (Vorstellungen) of objects rest on an effect that the will experiences; it suffers in that it is affected, and it is [in turn] active in that the suffering stirs it to an idea-producing activity. The object, however, that affects the ego is in itself unknown. We can only infer from our experience that what causes (erregt) suffering must itself be acting. Since there is absolutely no other activity known to us than that of our will, we can trace our suffering back only to some foreign will, and so what happens in general to the reciprocal action of different wills. The world may therefore be interpreted as the totality of will-activities, which in the course of their determination of one another … come to arrange themselves in a developmental series of will-unities of varied content."
y If we bear this in mind, we may to a certain extent explain Nietzsche's apparently contradictory views as to the place of conscious will in man (and in the world in general). He uses "will" sometimes in the sense of conscious will, in which sense it is not universal or elementary (cf. Dawn of Day, § 124), but again as practically identical with natural forces, the urge and inner ground of all life and activity. In his view, consciousness plays little part in physiological adaptations and organization—it is a fitful, broken, atomistic thing at best and more a resultant than a cause (cf. Will to Power, §§ 523, 526). It comes when there is need of it, and is used by deeper forces that may in turn dispense with it, when it has done its work. It is these deeper forces that are will proper (i.e., something commanding, imperative, bent on rule), the same in nature as in man. I do not mean that considerations of this sort meet all difficulties: some of his contradictions are perhaps incapable of resolution, e.g., that between a mechanistic and a teleological view of life. Nietzsche is now inclined in one way and now in another (cf. Werke, XIV, 353, § 215, with Beyond Good and Evil, § 36; Werke, XIII, 170, § 392; Will to Power, § 712). Still his drift as a whole, and indeed the particular significance of his doctrine of will to power, are antimechanistic. In ibid., § 712, he almost suggests the Bergsoniau view, "Absolute exclusion of mechanism and matter: both only forms of expression for the lower stages, the least spiritual shape that the will to power takes" ("die entgeistigste Form des Affekts, des 'Willena zur Macht'"). Had Nietzsche lived longer, he might have produced an articulated view to this effect.
z It must be admitted that §§ 563, 565 of Will to Power derive quality from differences of quantity, the contradiction being only obviated if "quality" here means something different from what it does in § 564, namely, a more or less æsthetic valuation, a human idiosyncrasy. It must be remembered that the grouping of paragraphs in Will to Power is the work of a later editor.
aa This does not mean that Nietzsche did not recognize the influence of environment—see his remarks on the shaping of races, Werke, XIV, 233, § 787. All the same, "the psychology of these M. Flauberts is in summa false: they see always simply the action of the outer world and the ego being formed (quite as Taine?),—they know only the weak in will, in whom desire takes the place of will" (ibid., XIV, 199, § 391). Again, "The theory of environment, now the Parisian theory par excellence, is itself a proof of a fateful disgregation of personality" (ibid., XIV, 215, § 434). Cf. Dorner's comment, op. cit., p. 139.
bb The sexual instinct is viewed in Will to Power, § 680, not as a mere necessity for the race, but as an expression of the strength or power of the individual, a maximal expression of power, which is superficially inconsistent with the view of propagation as the result of limited power expressed in ibid., § 654.
cc Nietzsche argues against Darwinism that the utility of an organ does not explain its rise, since during the greater part of the time it was forming, it may neither have preserved the individual nor been useful to him, least of all in the struggle with outer conditions and enemies (Will to Power, § 647; cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 12, where it is explained that the origin of a thing may have nothing to do with the use to which it is put by a superior power).
dd There is no mechanical necessity in the relation of the parts of an organism—much may be commanded that cannot be fully performed; hence, strain, e.g., of the stomach (Werke, XIII, 170, § 392; cf. 172, § 394).
ee The statement in the paragraph cited, "not 'increase of consciousness,' but heightening of power is the end," may possibly be directed against Fouillée, who also put will at the basis of things, but "will for consciousness" (according to A. Lalande, Philosophical Review, May, 1912, p. 294).
ff Nietzsche thinks that in a way pleasure rests on pain, being the sense of an obstacle that has been overcome. If the pleasure is to be great, the pain must be long, the tension of the bow extreme (Will to Power, § 658; cf. §§ 661, 694, 699). Pain, while different from pleasure, is not then its exact opposite; in will to pleasure, there is involved will to pain (ibid., §§ 490, 505, 669). He even goes so far as to say, "in itself there is no pain" (ibid., § 699); Schopenhauer had asserted the relativity of pain, but to the will (not necessarily to the intellect). Nietzsche does not think that pleasure and pain cause anything, being simply accompaniments of processes that would go on without them (ibid., § 478). In accordance with this general view of the nature and necessity of pain, is a remark to the effect that the simple unsatisfaction of our impulses (hunger, sex, or the impulse to move) contains nothing to lower our pitch—rather works to stimulate us (ibid.', §§ 697, 702). There are two kinds of pain, one that acts as a stimulus to the sense of power, another that arises after the expenditure of power; and to these correspond two kinds of pleasure, one such as we have in going to sleep in a state of exhaustion, the other the pleasure of victory (ibid., § 703).
gg Nietzsche even speaks of a "thinking" [i.e., the equivalent of our thinking] in the pre-organic world and calls it an enforcing of forms there, as in the case of the crystal. In our thinking the essential thing is the putting of new material into old schemata (= Procrustes bed) (Will to Power', § 499).
hh Cf. Nietzsche's own statement: "To become artist (creating), saint (loving), and philosopher (knowing) in one person—my practical aim" (Werke, XII, 213, § 448). The passage is perhaps reminiscent of his early aspiration, but this changed in form more than in substance. He says, indeed, in Ecce Homo (preface, § 2) that he is a disciple of Dionysus and would rather be a satyr than a saint, but he here means by "saint" one who turns his back on life. Even asceticism Nietzsche did not altogether discountenance, but the sort he favors was in the interests of life, not against it. Those whom he regards as the supreme type of men practise this kind of asceticism and find their pleasure in it (The Antichristian, § 57). In speaking of the future "lords of the earth" (who are to replace God for men and win the unconditional confidence of the ruled) he emphasizes first "their new sanctity (Heiligkeit), their renunciation of happiness and comfort" (Werke, pocket ed., VII, 486, § 36). Purity and renunciation (of some kind) are the essential elements in the concept of the saint (cf. the sympathetic portrayal of the saint as representing the highest instinct of purity in Beyond Good and Evil, § 271, also Genealogy etc., I, § 6; and the description of the redemptive man of great love and great contempt, who must sometime come, at the close of § 24 of Genealogy etc., II).
ii With this view of will to power as the essence of the world, accident may be looked at from a new point of view. It is true that each center of power lives and acts in the midst of a realm of the accidental; but this accident itself turns out to be the action of other centers of power. Accident really means then no more than that my will to power is crossed by somebody else's will to power. It would seem to follow then that if the power of the world could be organized, accident would disappear. Nietzsche does not draw the conclusion, and perhaps would have regarded such a consummation undesirable; but the conclusion seems inevitable.
CHAPTER XVI
a In another way the variety and freedom of individual opinion is, to Nietzsche, an advantage (cf. the tone of Werke, XI, 196, § 102; 371-2, § 566). The greater the range of difference, the more likelihood of finding at last a view that may unite mankind again (cf. the striking language with which he describes the competition of all egos to find the thought that will stand over mankind as its star, Werke, XII, 360, § 679).
b Fouillée remarks that Guyau felt the same as Nietzsche as to the need of a critique of morality, and that he himself had criticised Kant on this score (in his Critiques des systèmes de morale contemporaine, 1883), as had Renouvier and Charles Secrétan before him—see his Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, pp. 54-5.
c E. and A. Horneffer refer to Wundt, Liebmann, and Riehl, as well as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lotze, as holding that morality is something well-established and known—the only questions open being as to its formulation or the basis to be given to it (Das klassische Ideal, pp. 213-8). A recent writer on Nietzsche speaks of "moral axioms" (H. L. Stewart, Nietzsche and the Ideals of Modern Germany, pp. 87, 107) .
d A passage from Emerson may be quoted here: "Now shall we, because a good nature inclines us to virtue's side, say, there are no doubts and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner, and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue?" ("Montaigne," in Representative Men).
e William James once confessed something of this feeling to me. The fact that morality (as ordinarily understood) is something customary, plays a part, no doubt, in rendering it uninteresting, Nietzsche remarking that what is expected, usual, neutral for the feelings, makes the greater part of what the people calls its Sittlichkeit (Werke, XI, 212, § 133).
f Cf., for example, the qualifications he makes in offering his etymological derivation of moral terms in Genealogy of Morals, I, and what is implied in speaking of the need of essays under university auspices on the subject (in the note at the close); also the admission of the conjectural nature of his views as to the connection of guilt and suffering (ibid., II, § 6), the origin of "bad conscience" (ibid., II, § 16), and the connection of "guilt" and "duty" with religious presuppositions (ibid., II, § 21). I have already noted the significance of the full title of the Genealogy of Morals, namely, Zur Genealogie der Moral. H. L. Stewart, in attacking Nietzsche for incompetence and "incredible self-confidence," hardly bears these things in mind (op. cit., pp. 43-4).
CHAPTER XVII
a Nietzsche remarks that we cannot solve the problem of the worth of life in general, because, for one thing, we cannot take a position outside life (Twilight of the Idols, v, § 5; cf. ii, § 2).
b Cf. Simmel's comments, op. cit., p. 231; also as he is quoted in Nietzsche's Werke (pocket ed.), V, xxxii. See also Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 180-1, and A. W. Benn, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1908, p. 19. Nietzsche's sister recognizes that it would have been better if he had used expressions like "amoralisch," "Amoralismus" (Werke', pocket ed., IX, XXV) . On the other hand, Nietzsche became somewhat indifferent to misconceptions of his meaning, and said late in life, with a bit of malice, that it had become his habit not to write anything that did not bring those "in a hurry" to despair (preface, § 5, to Dawn of Day; cf. Werke, XIV, 359, § 225).
c This is not inconsistent with the view that the mores to which obedience is given may have originated more or less with ruling persons in the distant past, in accordance with the possible suggestions of Werke, XIII, 190, § 421. It is said there, in a discussion of punishment considered as a reaction of the powerful, that before the morality of the mos (whose canon is "everything traditional must be honored") stands the morality of the ruling person (whose canon is that "the ruler alone shall be honored"). "Before" here may mean in time or in rank and authority—I think the latter. Only if it means "earlier in time," is there basis for Willard Huntington Wright's view that morality, as understood by Nietzsche, "implies the domination of certain classes which, in order to inspire reverence in arbitrary dictates, have invested their codes with an authority other than a human one " (What Nietzsche Taught, p. 89)—I know no other passage which looks that way. Morality, in the general sense now under consideration, does not spring, in Nietzsche's estimation, from the dominance of any class, but from the necessities of group-life. Indeed, so far as the dominating class shape a morality, it is, as will appear later, one of their own, more or less different from that of the group at large.
d Mos or Sitte is thereby differentiated from habit as it may exist among animals (see Wundt's Ethics, Engl. tr., I, 131; of. also p. 156, where habit, usage, and Sitte are distinguished) .
e Sophocles, for example, describes them in language approaching to accuracy when he says in the "Antigone,"
""They are not of today nor yesterday,
But live for ever, nor can man assign
When first they sprang into being;"
he passes into superstition when he assigns to them a Divine origin. It is to be noted, too, that Sophocles distinguishes them from a prince's "edicts."
f Cf. implications of this sort in Werke, IX, 154; Human, etc., § 99; The Wanderer etc., § 40; Mixed Opinions etc., § 89; also Genealogy of Morals, II, § 8 (where buying and selling are said to be older than the beginnings of social organization), and II, § 16 (where, in developing a theory of "bad conscience," a wild state of man, before individuals came under the ban of society and peace, is spoken of). It may be noted that Aristotle spoke of the "clanless, lawless, heartless man," as described by Homer (Politics, I, ii). Nietzsche appears to have in mind formless, roving populations (Genealogy etc., II, § 17).
g Only so can I reconcile passages cited in the preceding note with the view now to be developed. But for the citations from Genealogy etc., one might conjecture that the idea of a pre-social state belonged to Nietzsche's earlier periods alone; he now even speaks of the social origin and meaning of our impulses and affects—there is no "state of nature" for them (Werke, XIII, 112, § 224). Dewey and Tufts say, "Psychologically the socializing process is one of building up a social self. Imitation and suggestion … are the aids in building up such a self" (op. cit., p. 11), that is, they too postulate a hypothetical self, not yet social, to start with.
h The group-connection of an individual appeared also in the fact that one member of a group might be attacked for the offense of another member, though he himself had no part in it, and that, on the other hand, the guilt of an individual was felt by the group as its own (Dawn of Day, § 9; cf. Dewey and Tufts, op. cit., pp. 28-9).
i Cf. the striking language, in entire agreement with the primitive view, of the late Father Tyrrell ("A much-abused Letter"): "In such a man [a truly social individual] the general mind and outlook supplants the personal and private; the general ends, interests, and affections absorb and transcend the particular; and, as an active member of the social organism, his internal and external energies are reinforced by those of the whole community, which acts with him and through him." H. L. Stewart is misled in saying that Nietzsche attributed "herd-morality" to a late epoch of decadence and failed to recognize the fact of primitive gregariousness (op. cit., pp. 44-6).
j René Berthelot remarks that since a large part of the content of the moral conscience of individuals is constituted by the collective interest of the social group to which they belong, it follows that in order that there may be no contradiction of duties, there should be society, but not societies, or that different social groups should not be in conflict. "But to speak exactly, society does not exist; what exists is societies, that is to say different groupings in which individuals find themselves united. To speak of society simply is to use the manner of speech of an attorney-general, not that of a man of science or of a philosopher" (Un romantisme utilitaire, I, 181).
k Cf. a striking picture of man's dread of isolation in early times and its moral significance: "To be alone, to feel detached, neither to obey nor to rule, to have the signification of an individual—this was then no pleasure, rather a punishment: one was condemned 'to be an individual.' To be free in thinking was discomfort itself. While we feel law and regulation as compulsion and loss, formerly egoism was the painful thing, a real misery. To be oneself, to value according to one's own weight and measure—for this there was no taste. Inclinations of such an order were felt as something insane, since every distress and every fear were associated with being alone. Then 'free will' had bad conscience for a very near neighbor; and the unfreer a man was in his conduct, the more flock-instinct and not personal judgment expressed itself in it, the more moral did he feel himself to be" (Joyful Science, § 117). Cf. the general remarks on man's need of social recognition by William James, Psychology, I, 293.
l Cf. the remark of William James, "The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an ideal world" (op. cit., I, 316).
CHAPTER XVIII
a Nietzsche in writing to Brandes (see Werke, pocket ed., IX, xxvii) says that many words have with him particular shades of meaning (Salzen), but in this case he does little more than conform to current German usage.
b Cf. the reference (Dawn of Day, § 9) to those who depart from tradition, prompted by motives like those which originally led to its establishment, viz., the group's good; also the line,
"Strange to the people, and yet useful to the people"
in "Scherz, List und Rache," § 49 (prefixed to Joyful Science); still again the description of the Schopenhauer type of man and reformer in "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 4.
c Cf. William Blake's view of evil as one of the pair of wedded contraries without which there is no progression (Works, ed. by E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, II, 63); also the views of Jacob Böhme as given by Karl Joël (op. cit., pp. 194-5). Lou Andreas-Salomé happily states Nietzsche's position (op. cit., pp. 199-200). See further, Will to Power, §§ 1015, 1017, 1019. From a slightly different point of view Nietzsche says (Werke, XII, 86, § 168) , "We æstheticians of the highest order would not miss also crimes and vice and torments of the soul and errors—and a society of the wise would probably create for itself an evil (böse) world in addition. I mean that it is no argument against the æsthetic nature (Künstlerschaft) of God that evil and pain exist—however, against His 'goodness.' But what is goodness? The disposition to help and do good to, which just so far presupposes those for whom things go badly, and who are bad (schlecht)"!
d Cf. what he wrote a friend in 1881, "It grieves me to hear that you suffer, that anything is lacking to you, that you have lost some one—although in my case suffering and deprivation belong to the normal and not, as for you, to the unnecessary and irrational side of existence" (quoted by Lou Andreas-Salomé, op. cit., p. 16). Cf. a letter to Brandes, Briefe, III, 302; also Werke, XIII, 219, § 469. Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas in memory of Edward Quillinan" and the passage in Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons beginning "A smooth and easy life" (Vol. V, p. 337) may also be referred to here.
e Dawn of Day, § 354. Cf. the striking poems, "To Grief" and "To Life," by Lou Andreas-Salomé, reproduced in Halévy's La Vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, pp. 251 and 254; the first was dedicated to Nietzsche (summer of 1882), the second set to music by Nietzsche (the music and a translation of the words are given at the close of Vol. XVII of the English ed. of the Works) .
f Montaigne is frank: "Let the philosophers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is pleasure. It pleases me to rattle in their ears this word, which they so nauseate to hear, etc." (Essays, I, xix) .
g Cf. Werke, XII, 90, § 177; 87, § 171 (where love and cruelty are said to be not opposites, but discoverable always in the firmest and best natures—e.g., in the Christian God, a being very wise and excogitated without moral prejudices); also Will to Power, § 852.
h Along the lines of the "theodicy" referred to earlier (pp. 233-4) Nietzsche says, "Whoever believes in good and evil [i.e., as strictly antithetical], can never treat evil as a means to good; and every teleological world-view becomes impossible which does not break absolutely with morality" (Werke, XIII, 126, § 287).
i Nietzsche has a hard saying as to the classical type of character, asking "Whether the moral monstra [those in whom the 'good' impulses are alone developed] are not of necessity romanticists, in word and deed," something of "evil" being required in the make-up of the classical type (Will to Power, § 848).
j Cf. Mabel Atkinson on vices as the outgrown virtues of our animal ancestry (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1908, p. 302).
CHAPTER XIX
a See Beyond Good and Evil, § 260; Genealogy etc., I, § 16. Richter thinks that it was just this diversity and contrariety of moral judgments today that led Nietzsche to the hypothesis of original class moralities (op. cit., p. 314).
b Cf. the New Testament passage (James i, 27) where one of the marks of "pure" religion is said to be keeping oneself "unspotted from the world," and Matthew Arnold's description of the "children of the Second Birth," the "small transfigured band"
"Whose one bond is, that all have been
Unspotted by the world."
in "Stanzas in Memory of Oberman."
c Emile Faguet (En lisant Nietzsche, pp. 327-8) makes the criticism that there are not merely these two moralities, but an indefinite number. Riehl (op. cit., p. 117) reflects on Nietzsche in the same way. But this is superficial. Nietzsche explicitly recognizes the numerous types, and simply singles out those that seem to him most important.
d Schopenhauer in his Grundlage der Moral used the term "slave morality" for that which is practised in obedience to a command (such as Kant posited).
e N. Awxentieff (Kultur-ethisches Ideal Nietzsches, p. 104), thinks that the primitive group was, according to Nietzsche's view (he cites Joyful Science, § 23), a completely indifferentiated mass, homogeneous throughout; but this is an exaggerated statement. It is true that Nietzsche's "great individuals" are a late product of social evolution, but individuals sufficiently marked off to lead and rule have characterized every stage of society, at least above the hunting and nomadic.
f Dewey and Tufts say, "The term good, when used in our judgments upon others (as in a 'good' man), may have a different history [from that in the economic sphere]. As has been noted, it may come from class feeling; or from the praise we give to acts as they immediately please. It may be akin to noble, or fine, or admirable" (op. cit., p. 184). This is a beginning along the line of distinctions and refinements such as Nietzsche's, but only a beginning. On the other hand, Höffding thinks that the doctrine of master- and slave-morality was falsely derived (op. cit., pp. 142, 156). It may be added that Nietzsche does not always use "gut und schlecht" and "gut und böse" in the special senses described in the text, but sometimes quite generally.
g Further descriptions of the subject-class and their type of morality may be found in Werke, XIV, 67, § 133, and Genealogy etc., I, § 14. In Beyond Good and Evil, § 260, they are spoken of as the "subjugated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, uncertain of themselves and weary." In Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 3, their virtues are described as resignation, modesty, prudence, and industry.
h Cf. the striking paragraph. Human, etc., § 81, on the difference in standpoint and feeling between the doer of an injury and the sufferer from it.
i Wundt remarks, "Language is the oldest witness to the course of development of all human ideas. Hence it is to language that we must put our first questions in investigating the origin of moral ideas" (op. cit., I, 23). On the other hand, Westermarck discards all questions of etymology as irrelevant to the subject, adding, "The attempt to apply the philological method to an examination of moral concepts has, in my opinion, proved a failure—which may be seen from Mr. Bayne's book on 'The Idea of God and the Moral Sense in the Light of Language'" (Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, I, 133)—apparently a large conclusion from a slight premise.
j Riehl says that this "class" view of Nietzsche's is not a new one—Paul Rée having advanced it in Die Entstehung des Gewissens (1885—Beyond Good and Evil appeared in the same year, but Genealogy of Morals two years later), and having been able to cite as authorities P. E. Müller, Grote, and Welcker. Nietzsche, in the preface to Genealogy etc., refers only to Rée's earlier work, Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (1877), but Lou Andreas-Salomé appears to be of the opinion that he was none the less indebted to Rée, through conversations had with him while the latter was preparing Die Entstehung des Gewissens (op. cit., pp. 189-90). Ziegler traces Nietzsche's view back to Leopold Schmidt's Ethik der alten Griechen (1882).
k Welcker (quoted by Grote, History of Greece, II, 419 ff.) remarks that by this time the political or class senses of "good" and "bad" had fallen into desuetude.
l Riehl argues that a process, which is supposed to be typical, ought always to be met with under similar circumstances, and asks, "But where among the Greeks is the 'slave-morality' to be found along with their master-morality" (op. cit., p. 119)? The argument is plausible, but slightly wooden, for tendencies may exist even if the conditions are not present which allow them to go into effect. Even so, there are not wanting signs that something like a "slave-morality" showed its beginnings in Greece. If what Callicles says in Plato's "Gorgias" relates at all to matter of fact, the mass did sometimes endeavor to put through their own point of view and make laws and moral distinctions in their own interest. This "accomplished Athenian gentleman," as Jowett speaks of him—at least a representative of the old order and out of humor with his time—gives it as his opinion that it is the weaker and more numerous mass who are making the laws and making them for their own advantage, distributing praise and blame, too, from the standpoints of their own interests; they go counter to old ideas of what is just and right and will have nothing of the superior privileges of superior men; equality is their watchword; for one to have more than others (τὸ πλεονεκτειν, translated, in misleading fashion, "dishonesty" by Jowett) is in their eyes shameful and unjust ("Gorgias," pp. 483-4). That Callicles did not oppose law, but that kind of law, is indicated by his questioning whether what a rabble of slaves and nondescripts, who are of no use except perhaps for their physical strength, gather to impose, are laws (489).
m Really the later type of prophets, for the first ones "were probably little more than frenzied seers" (so C. H. Toy, History of the Religion of Israel, p. 34—see e.g., I Samuel xix, 24) .
n "The words anav, sweet, and ani, poor, both springing from the same root signifying modest, become in this limited world of a fanatical people synonymous. The concepts poor, afflicted, oppressed, mild, resigned, pious are no longer distinguished, and the words which properly signify poor (dal, ebion) become equivalent to holy men, friends of God. The anavim or hasidim form the elect of humanity; they are the sweet of the world, the righteous, the upright, the pious. The Hebrew words (asir, gadol, avis) become designations of blame; the rich, the merry, the bold mocker (lec) are for the pious objects of the most furious hate" (Wilhelm Weigand, Friedrich Nietzsche, ein psychologischer Versuch, pp. 58-9).
o Occasionally Christian scholars themselves read between the lines. For example, Weinel, after mentioning the fact that Christianity in its first period lived among the lower strata of the Roman Empire, says, "We must grant that from many an early Christian writing there speaks not the contempt of a higher ideal for what is impure and common, but the hate of the oppressed and trampled upon, the persecuted and exploited. One need only read the Apocalypse of John or the Epistle of James." He adds, however, that this was contrary to the principle and word of Jesus (op. cit., p. 179).
p In Human, etc., § 45, Nietzsche had held that our present morality grew up among the ruling races and classes. The later view developed in the text is contradictory—we may perhaps say that he came to see the present moral situation more distinctly; but the difference may be partly owing to the fact that in the passage cited he conceives of the subject-classes or races as mere heaps of individuals without fellow-feeling, afraid and suspicious of every one.
CHAPTER XX
a At the same time Nietzsche remarks that the air of gloom and severity usually investing duties may lessen, or even pass away. When duty ceases to be hard to us, when after long practice it changes into a pleasant inclination and a need, then the rights of others to which our duties, now our inclinations, correspond, become something different, namely, occasions for agreeable sensations. When the Quietists no longer experienced anything oppressive in their Christianity and found only pleasure in God, they took for their motto "All for the glory of God ": whatever they then did it was sacrifice no longer—the motto might equally have been "All for our pleasure"! To demand that duty shall always be burdensome (lästig)—as Kant does—means that it shall never become habit and custom (Dawn of Day, § 339).
b The state, for instance, did not arise in contract, rather in violence, but its rights come in time to be recognized, and duties to it too (cf. Genealogy etc., II, § 17).
CHAPTER XXI
a In another passage (Will to Power, § 738) he speaks differently, "Every power which prohibits and knows how to awaken fear in the person whom the prohibition affects, produces 'bad conscience' (that is, an impulse to something with a consciousness of the dangerousness of satisfying it and of the necessity thence of secrecy, by-ways, precaution). Every prohibition produces a worse character, in those who do not willingly obey it, but are only forced." But here "bad conscience" is little more than fear.
b The worth of Nietzsche's analysis of the general idea of a moral order is sometimes recognized in theological circles. Weinel gives up the idea, remarking, "Actually this form of faith in God occupies the whole foreground of our religious teaching, so that not only the pastor and the religious teacher … but also professors of philosophy and of theology, regard it as the Christian conception. And even our 'atheists,' who no longer believe in God, think that they can still believe in the phantom of this 'moral world-order.' But it is a phantom, and Nietzsche has recognized it as such rightly, and perhaps with more penetration than any one else in our whole generation" (op. cit., p. 197).
c The idea that there must be wrong somewhere to account for suffering is given a curious turn by those who charge up their troubles to other people and find a certain easement thereby. Nietzsche notes the way in which socialists and modern decadents generally hold the upper classes or the Jews or the social order or the system of education responsible for the state in which they find themselves: they want to fasten guilt somewhere (Will to Power, § 765). One thinks of Matthew Arnold's subtle line,
"With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily."
d Nietzsche dissents also from the metaphysical manipulation of "ought," which makes it a means of reaching a transcendental order of things, i.e., "transcendental freedom" in the Kantian and Schopenhauerian sense (Will to Power, § 584; Twilight of the Idols, v, § 6).
e It is true that Nietzsche has occasional satirical reflections on the impulse to obey; cf., on the Germans, Dawn of Day, § 207; Werke, XIII, 344-5, § 855; and, generally, Werke, XI, 214-5, § 141; Joyful Science, § 5. And there can be no question that the impulse to command ranks higher than that to obey. All the same, he recognizes the organic place of obedience in the scheme of things.
f In what seems a similar spirit John Dewey finds distinctions between men vanishing, when their common "birth and destiny in nature" is remembered. Democracy appears in his eyes accordingly as "neither a form of government nor a social philosophy, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience to nature" (Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, pp. 777-8). This is democracy with a vengeance!
g Cf. the language to the working-class of an American socialist poet (Arthur Giovanitti):
"Think, think! while breaks in you the dawn.
Crouched at your feet the world lies still.
It has no power but your brawn.
It has no wisdom but your will.
Beyond your flesh and mind and blood.
Nothing there is to live and do.
There is no man, there is no God,
There is not anything but you."
h In Beyond Good and Evil, § 23, he says that there are a hundred good reasons why any one should keep away from his circle of ideas who —can! "We others are the exception and the danger, who never dare be the rule" (Joyful Science, § 76; cf. Dawn of Day, § 507). Interesting in this connection is an enumeration of ways in which antiquity may and may not be useful to us now: for example, it is not for young people; it is not for direct imitation; it is approachable only for few—and morals should comprise some kind of police regulations here, as it should also against bad pianists who play Beethoven (Werke, X, 412, § 273).
CHAPTER XXII
a The word "altruism" is called an "Italian hybrid" by a writer on Nietzsche in the Quarterly Review (October, 1896, pp. 314-5); according to the Grande Encyclopédie, it was invented by Comte.
b Cf . Nietzsche's language: "What is done from love is always beyond good and evil" (Beyond Good and Evil, § 153); "Jesus said to his Jewish followers, 'the law was for servants—love God, as I love him, as his son! what is morality to us'!" (ibid., § 164); "What is done from love is not moral but religious" (Werke, XII, 289, § 296); and the description of the feeling of Paul and the first Christians, "all morality, all obeying and doing, fails to produce the feeling of power and freedom which love produces—from love one does nothing bad (Schlimmes), one does much more than one would do from obedience and virtuous principle" (Will to Power, § 176).
c F. Rittelmeyer, commenting on the fact that Goethe's egoism led him to refuse the importunities of strangers, says, "That Goethe could have committed no greater crime against humanity than to have sacrificed himself to such importunate people, and in this way failed to have produced his immortal works, is not thought of" (Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 93).
d This by J. M. Warbeke, Harvard Theological Review, July, 1909, p. 368. Cf. Richard Beyer, Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe, p. 21, and even H. Scheffauer, Quarterly Review, July, 1913, p. 170.
e Paul Elmer More thinks that for a right understanding of Nietzsche we must find his place in the debate between egotism (sic) and sympathy, self-interest and benevolence, which has been going on for two centuries, and devotes nearly a third of his little book already cited (pp. 19-47) to an historical review of the contest as it has been waged in England, mentioning Rousseau, Kant, and Schleiermacher briefly at the close. But it is a mistake to range Nietzsche baldly on the side of egoism against sympathy, self-interest against benevolence; he really leaves that wearisome controversy behind. His problem is pity, and pity particularly as viewed by Schopenhauer. Curiously enough, the author does not even mention Schopenhauer in the connection. In saying the above I do not forget that Nietzsche opposed the overemphasis on sympathy and altruism characteristic of our time. Comte, he remarks, "with his celebrated formula vivre pour autrui has in fact outchristianized Christianity" (Dawn of Day, § 132). "Our socialists are decadents, but also Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent—he sees in the triumph of altruism something desirable" (Twilight etc., IX, § 37; cf. Joyful Science, § 373). "We are no humanitarians; we should never dare allow ourselves to speak of our 'love to mankind'—for this one like us is not actor enough or not Saint-Simonist enough, or Frenchman enough!" (Joyful Science, § 377). He even regards the modern softening of manners as a result of decline, speaking of our "morals of sympathy, which might be called l'impressionisme morale," as one more expression of the physiological oversensitiveness, peculiar to everything that is decadent; in contrast, "strong times, superior cultures, see in pity, in 'love of neighbors,' in deficiency of personality and self-feeling, something despicable" (Twilight etc., ix, § 37) . All this, however, does not mean that Nietzsche failed to recognize the due place of sympathy and altruism in normal social life.
f Hans Bélart remarks that when Nietzsche criticises morality and comes to the conclusion that it is the danger of dangers, we must remember that it was above all the morality of his great teacher Schopenhauer which he had in mind—a morality that emphasized the impulses of self-denial and self-sacrifice, and so gilded them and deified them and made metaphysical use of them (verjenseitigt), that they became absolute values, from the standpoint of which he turned against life and even himself. Further, as Nietzsche viewed matters, this doctrine of denial and asceticism was closely interwoven with Christianity, and it was on this account that he turned against Christianity (Nietzsches Metaphysik, pp. 1-3). The antithesis of morality—this type of morality—to life might be stated as follows: in the last analysis life lives off other life, but morality leads us to identify ourselves with other life; so far then as we do this, the will to assert ourselves on our own account tends to vanish—with a complete identification the basis of individual existence would disappear.
g So Carl Lory, Nietzsche als Geschichtsphilosoph, p. 22. Nietzsche had said in "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" (sect. 5) that one could not be happy with suffering everywhere about one. This and the first three citations in the text belong to the first period of his life, but as they are only in keeping with later utterances, it seems allowable to use them here.
h This to von Gersdorff, May 26, 1876 (Briefe, I, 379). He wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug, March 24, 1875, "I have wished that I could daily do some good thing to others. This autumn I proposed to myself to begin each morning by asking, Is there no one to whom thou couldst do some good today? … I vex too many men by my writings, not to feel obliged to attempt to make it up to them somehow" (quoted in Meyer's Nietzsche, p. 666) .
i In "The Use and Harm of History," sect. 2, those who pass through life "pitiful and helpful" are spoken of with honor, as well as other types. Soft, benevolent, pitiful feelings are classed among the good things once counted bad (schlimme) things in Genealogy etc., III, § 9. In Dawn of Day, § 136, pity is even recognized as a self-preservative power for certain individuals (e.g., those Hindus who find the aim of all intellectual activity in coming to know human misery) since it takes them away from themselves, banishes fear and numbness (Erstarrung), and incites to words and actions.
j Nietzsche recognizes that this is its normal character. "With alms one maintains the situation that makes the motive to alms. One gives then not from pity, for this would not wish to continue the situation" (Werke, XI, 227, §172—italics mine). Dewey and Tufts are hardly right in suggesting that Nietzsche overlooks "the reaction of sympathy to abolish the source of suffering" (op. cit., p. 370 n).
k Weinel makes the following admission: "Let us ask ourselves if we wish to be pitied by others, if we find an attitude of this sort toward us pleasing? … Even if Nietzsche's course in following up the most secret feelings of one who pities is dictated by suspicion, and his thought or scent takes him too far, it is still true that the noblest type of soul cannot show pity without feeling some kind of superiority and placing himself over against the other as the giving party" (op. cit., pp. 172-3).
l Sometimes he makes distinctions on the subject. "'On n'est bon que par la pitié: il faut done qu'il y ait quelque pitié dans tous nos sentiments'—so sounds morality at present! And how has this come about?—That the man of sympathetic, disinterested, publicly useful, gregarious actions is now felt to be the moral man, is perhaps the most general effect and change of mind which Christianity has produced in Europe; although it was neither its intention nor its doctrine" (Dawn of Day, 132—the italics are mine) .
m So a writer whom Dolson quotes (op. cit., p. 100). The Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Ethics," calls Nietzsche "the most orthodox exponent of Darwinian ideas in their application to ethics." It seems to be the general view, even Frank Thilly saying, "Nietzsche made this theory the basis of his new ethics" (Philosophical Review, March, 1916, p. 190).
n Cf., e.g., Will to Power, §§ 70, 647-52, 684, 685; Twilight etc., ix, § 14. One who wishes a discriminating treatment of the subject cannot do better than read pp. 219-38 of Richter's Friedrich Nietzsche. Simmel, in "Fr. Nietzsche, eine moralphilosophische Silhouette" (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1906), and Oskar Ewald in Nietzsches Lehre in ihren Grundbegriffen, deny specifically Darwinian elements in the theory of the superman, though Simmel's view appears to be somewhat modified in his Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907—see p. 5).
o The loftier elevation, where pity is transcended, is portrayed in these lines:
"
"Destined, O star, for radiant path.
No claim on thee the darkness hath!
Roll on in bliss through this, our age!
Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage!
In furthest worlds thy beams shall glow:
Pity, as sin, thou must not know!
Be pure: that duty's all you owe."
The transation is Thomas Common's—the original, with the title, "Sternen-Moral," being § 63 of "Scherz, List und Rache," prefixed to Joyful Science. Similar sentiment is expressed in Beyond Good and Evil, §§ 271, 284; Will to Power, § 985.
CHAPTER XXIII
a Vernon Lee says in Vital Lies, "Make no use of 'vital lies,' they are vital and useful only when they are accepted as vital truths"—as if being "accepted as vital truths" was inconsistent with their being "lies"!
b Paul Carus does not interpret Nietzsche's attitude to truth and science very finely when he says that "he expressed the most sovereign contempt for science," was "too proud to submit to anything, even to truth," or "to recognize the duty of inquiring," and rejected "with disdain" the "methods of the intellect" (Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, pp. 5-8).
c Even Dolson (op. cit., p. 96), but not William Wallace (op. cit., pp. 533-4), who, however, hardly does justice to the full import of Nietzsche's skepticism.
d Cf. Richter's lucid statement: "In the realms of values there are no true and no false ideas, in the time-honored sense of agreement or disagreement of an idea with its object. For there are here no objects, known as existing, but only something not existing in advance, namely, goals or ends (Ziele) which are arbitrarily created by an act of will. And for this creative act there is in turn no other regulative than the individual will" (op. cit., p. 211).
e The high place which Nietzsche gives to justice appears notably in Genealogy etc., II, § 1; Will to Power, § 967; Werke, XIV, 80, § 158. He admits, indeed, that we can hardly be just to ideals which are different from our own (cf. Werke, XII, 136, §263), and that there is a natural antinomy, even in a philosopher, between strong love and hate and justice or fairness (Will to Power, §976).
CHAPTER XXIV
a Zarathustra says (II, ii), "If there were Gods, how could I endure to be no God?" It is easy to scoff at such a saying, but if we go beneath the surface, we see that it is only an extravagant way of expressing the deeply-felt obligation to be like God which is at the root of the saying of Jesus. See the illuminating remarks of Simmel, op. cit., pp. 204-5.
b Cf. the early statement in "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6, beginning, "I see something higher and more human above me than I myself am" (quoted in full on p. 61). In a way the impulse rested on a need—a pressing need in his case, familiar with the tragic view of things as he was—the need of something joy-producing: "Love to men? But I say, Joy in men! and that this may not be irrational, we must help produce what will give joy"—hence select, seek out, and further those who do, or may, and let the misshapen and degenerate die out (Werke, XI, 247-8, §213).
c No one has developed this general view with greater thoroughness than Edmund Montgomery (see his Philosophical Problems in the Light of Vital Organization, and numerous articles in Mind and The Monist). Montgomery writes as a biologist, with at the same time the broader outlook and the penetration of the philosopher.
d See the general line of considerations in Werke, XIII, 181, § 412. Dolson says that the existence of the altruistic instincts was "admitted," but "deplored" by Nietzsche—"one must conquer them" (op. cit., p. 100). This, as a broad statement, is distinctly a mistake. Altruism is only deplored when exercised in a certain way. She is also mistaken in saying that the higher man in sacrificing himself sacrifices "only that side of his nature that finds expression in self-sacrifice" (p. 101)—he may sacrifice himself altogether, giving up his life.
e Cf. A. W. Benn, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1908, pp. 19-21. But when Benn suggests that Nietzsche was prevented from accepting utilitarianism by the pervading skeptical and negative cast of his intellect, aggravated by the use of drugs and solitary habits, he is hardly sagacious.
f For Nietzsche's various and varying views of pleasure and happiness, cf. Werke, XI, 219, §153; XIV, 88, §177; Will to Power, §260 (where the point is that happiness may be reached in opposite ways, and hence is no basis for ethics); Zarathustra, prologue, § 5 (a description of the happiness of a degenerate type of man); Dawn of Day, § 339; Werke, XII, 148, § 295; Will to Power, § 260 (habit, necessity, and our own valuations of things factors in determining pleasure and pain); Werke, XIII, 208-9, § 477 (happiness as distinguished from enjoyment, Genuss); Dawn of Day, § 108 (the happiness of different stages of development incomparable with one another, being neither higher nor lower, but simply peculiar).
g H. Goebel and E. Antrim do not take this into account when they speak (among other things) of the "right of the individual to obey absolutely all the instincts and impulses of his nature," as "Nietzscheanism" (Monist, July, 1899, p. 571). Nietzsche also expresses himself in this way: "The opposite of the heroic ideal is the ideal of all-round development—and a beautiful opposite and one very desirable, but only an ideal for men good from the bottom up (e.g., Goethe)." This was written for Lou Andreas-Salomé, and is quoted by her (op. cit., p. 25).
h Cf. in this connection the striking remarks on the modern educated man, even including Goethe (after all kein Olympier"!) in Will to Power, § 883; cf. 881. Nietzsche's thought is that while the great men must have many sides and a variety of powers, these must all be yoked together in the service of a supreme aim. See also the comments in "Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 2, on two contrasted ideals of education.
i A similar shade of antithetical meaning appears in what Zarathustra says to the higher men who come to him, "Better despair than surrender [i.e., to the small people with small virtues and policies, who are lords of today]. And truly I love you, because you know not how to live today. So do you live—best!" (Zarathustra, IV, xii, § 3). Heinrich Scharren puts the distinction in this way: "Not life as existence in general is the supreme value to Nietzsche, but life as will to power" (Nietzsches Stellung zum Eudamonismus, p. 47).
j Dorner (op. cit., p. 152) calls it a contradiction to turn a pure principle of nature into a principle of value. Valuing is indeed a distinct act of the mind, and an end as such has no independent existence, being wholly relative to the mind and will that set it, but why may not the mind give supreme value to something actually existing (or developing)?
k Cf. a general critical reflection: "Individualism is a modest and as yet unconscious sort of 'will to power'; the individual thinks it enough to liberate himself from the superior power of society (whether state or church). He puts himself in opposition not as person, but purely as individual; he stands for individuals in general as against the collectivity. This means that instinctively he puts himself on the same plane with every individual; what he contends for, he contends for not on behalf of himself as a person, but as the representative of individuals against the whole" (Will to Power, §784). What Nietzsche means by "persons" will appear later.
l See Simmel, op. cit., pp. 233-4; cf. p. 245 ("That this doctrine should be taken for a frivolous egoism, a sanctioning of Epicurean unbridledness, belongs to the most astonishing illusions in the history of morals"—the illusion is shared in striking manner by Paul Carus, op. cit., pp. 34, 61, 104, 138). So G. A. Tienes, "No ordinary egoist can appeal to Nietzsche with even an appearance of right" (Nietzsches Stelltmg zu den Grundfragen der Ethik genetisch dargestellt, p. 30). Ernst Horneffer also has discriminating remarks on the subject, Vorträge über Nietzsche, pp. 80-1; and Carl Lory, Nietzsche als Geschichtsphilosoph, p. 22. As to Stirner, see Richter, op. cit., pp. 345-7; Riehl, op. cit., p. 86; Meyer, op. cit., pp. 89-90; Dolson, op. cit., p. 95; Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 154, 157; R. H. Grützmacher, op. cit., p. 170. A special literature has arisen as to the relation of Stirner to Nietzsche—cf. Robert Schellwein, Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche (1892); A. Lévy, Stirner et Nietzsche (Paris, 1904). It appears doubtful whether Nietzsche had read Stirner's book (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum); if he had, its influence upon him is inappreciable. Of the Greek Sophists it may be said that Nietzsche unquestionably has points of view in common with them (see his own comment on them, Will to Power, §§428-9), but this should not obscure for us the differences. A convenient book for the study of Nietzsche's relation to the early Greek thinkers in general, the Sophists included, is Richard Oehler's Nietzsche und die Vorsokratiker. I may also mention Max Wiesenthal, Friedrich Nietzsche und die griechische Sophistik, and Benedict Lachmann, Protagoras, Nietzsche, Stirner.
Unquestionably the best general treatment of Nietzsche's positive ethics thus far is Richter's, op. cit., pp. 199-268 (see particularly pp. 210 ff., 239 ff.).
CHAPTER XXV
a Cf., for example, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," sect. 11 ("Who of you is ready to renounce power, knowing and feeling that power is evil"?); sect. 8 (reflections on Wagner's own early temptation to seek for "power and glory"); Human, etc., § 588 ("We hate the arrogance of the great man, not so far as he feels his power, but because he wants to feel it only in injuring others, domineering over them and seeing how far they will stand it"); ibid., §261 (on the pride and tyrannical tendencies of the early Greek philosophers).
b A more pertinent incident in this connection is mentioned by his sister, namely the feeling aroused in him as he witnessed a train of German cavalry, artillery, and infantry advancing to the front during the Franco-Prussian war. He was deeply stirred, and many years afterward said to his sister, "I felt that the strongest and highest will to life does not come to expression in a pitiful struggle for existence, but as a will for combat, a will for power and supremacy " (Werke, pocket ed., IX, xi). Cf. the comments on the incident by Miss Hamblen (op. cit., pp. 46-7), who, however, appears to me to exaggerate in speaking of the doctrine as a "revelation" or "intuition."
c It is true that a different idea of nature as involving order and law appears in Beyond Good and Evil, § 188. There is also an early suggestion ("David Strauss etc.," sect. 7) of the possibility of developing an ethics along the lines of Darwin's conception of nature, where the strong have the mastery (a suggestion which Nietzsche is popularly supposed to have carried out eventually himself—on this point, see pp. 310, 401, 437). In quite another sense, the highest type of man is once spoken of as a copy of nature, namely in the prodigality with which he overflows, exercising much reason in details, but prodigal as a whole and indifferent to consequences (Werke, XIV, 335, § 178; cf. Twilight etc., ix, § 44).
d The articles appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, that of James in the number for October, 1880. The latter is reproduced in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (pp. 216-54).
e Riehl criticises: "This monotonous power! more power! Power over what, we ask, and above all, power for what?" (op. cit., p. 124). Would he say the same of "life"? Is it monotonous, save to the weary, to speak of life, and more life? Would one ask of life, "for what"? Has it a purpose beyond itself and its own utmost development? Yet to Nietzsche power and will to it are the concrete and foundation meaning of life. I may add that as power, or will to power is to Nietzsche the ultimate reality of things, it has no origin (Will to Power, § 690), and can have no outside legitimation (cf. Werke, XI, 20, § 114; XII, 207, § 441; XIII, 198, § 436; VII, pocket ed., 485, § 34).
f Cf. Emerson to the effect that power is rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supersaturation or excess which makes it dangerous and destructive, and yet that it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge ("Power," in Conduct of Life).
g That Nietzsche himself felt the difficulty keenly is shown in Will to Power, § 685; cf. Werke, XIV, 218, § 440. F. C. S. Schiller, in commenting on a similar passage (Will to Power, § 864) , says, "The candor of the admission that the 'strong' are in reality the weaker, does not seem to leave much substance in Nietzsche's advocacy of the strong-man doctrine" (Quarterly Review, January, 1913, p. 157).
h The paradox that the weak in combination, by making laws against the strong, prove themselves the stronger, plays its part in the argument of Socrates against Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias" (488). One feels in reading the dialogue that Socrates is the greater dialectician, but that it is chiefly a verbal victory which he wins over Callicles, who really has in mind a strong type of man, yet is not able to express himself clearly and perhaps has not thought out his meaning anyway.
i Richter remarks on the vagueness of the concept (op. cit., p. 325); cf. Fouillée, Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, II, chap. 1, and F. C. S. Schiller, Quarterly Review, January, 1915, p. 157 ("He never unambiguously explains what he means by 'strength' and seems to have no consistent notion of it"). But is not the vagueness of the concept partly owing to the fact that, like all abstractions, it gets its real meaning in concrete instances, and a more or less varied meaning as the instances differ?
j So far as he attempts an explanation of the world in terms of will (or wills) to power, it is only, to use a happy expression of Richter's, a metaphysics of the first degree; what the real and ultimate nature of power (and will to it) is, he leaves undetermined, perhaps viewing it as an unnecessary question.
k Not that the possibilities of progress are infinite. The total amount of force, energy, or power (they are equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) in the world, however great, is limited, and the combinations it can make and the heights it can attain, however far beyond anything we know now, have their limits too. When then the end is reached, power can only turn on itself, dissolve the fabrics it has made, and allow the play to begin again (cf. Will to Power, § 712; Zarathustra, III, xiii, § 2; Joyful Science, § 111). It is Heraclitus' Æon, or the great "world-child Zeus," παῖς παίζων over again (cf. "Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sects. 7, 8; Will to Power, § 797).
l As to the inner mechanics of the evolution of higher sorts of power from lower, I am not able to make out a clear consistent view in Nietzsche. He sometimes speaks as if the higher powers seized on the lower and subjugated them, being presumably then independent existences themselves (the kinship being only that all are alike forms of power); and yet he generally uses the language of strict evolution. Perhaps, even if there are eternally different kinds of power, this is not inconsistent with the higher being spiritualizations of the lower, rather than of a different substance.
m Mind, for instance, may have its ascendancy over matter, just because it is a spiritualization of the same energy that is in matter (this aside from the fact that matter may be itself only statable ultimately in energetic terms).
n It can only be said in charity that even those "who know" cannot in this age of the world be expected to know everything, especially when the subject is so strange and multiform a thinker as Nietzsche. I give only a few of the many instances of hasty judgment:—The superman "will strive to become like the 'blonde Beastie' of the old German forests, etc." (J. M. Warbeke, Harvard Theological Review, July, 1909, p. 373); Nietzsche's speculations, "if ever they come to be acted upon, would dissolve society as we understand it and bring us back to the 'dragons of the prime'" (Bennett Hume, London Quarterly Review, October, 1900, p. 338); "'We have now at last,' says Nietzsche, 'arrived at the brink of the period when wickedness shall prevail again, as it did in the good old heroic times when the strong man scalped, and stole, and lied, and cheated, and abducted'" (Oswald Crauford, Nineteenth Century, October, 1900, p. 604); "One must … get back once more to a primitive naturalness in which man is a magnificent blond beast, etc." (H. T. Peck, Bookman, September, 1898, p. 30); "imagined as Nietzsche describes him, he [the Übermensch] reels back into the beast" (Encyclopedia Britannica, art. "Ethics"). So A. S. Pringle Pattison speaks of this "wild beast theory of ethics," and finds Nietzsche's message to be "Back therefore to instinct, to 'the original text' of man" (Man's Place in the Cosmos, 2d ed., p. 317). C. C. Everett, rarum nomen among American philosophical writers, who indeed expresses his perfect agreement with Nietzsche's doctrine that the desire of power is the fundamental element of life, the only question being what kind of a self is asserted, finds Nietzsche's point of view practically "identical with that of a robber-baron of the Middle Ages" (Essays Theological and Literary, pp. 124-9). G. Lowes Dickinson, in commenting on Nietzsche's view that power is the only thing that man will care to pursue, says that a man who has a right to such opinions would in our society become a great criminal, an active revolutionary, or an anarchist (Justice and Liberty, pp. 14-19)—a dictum the stranger, since the author himself says later, "Moral force in the end is the only force" (p. 217).
o Riehl says, "The already proverbial 'blond beast' is not an ideal of Nietzsche's, but his symbol for man as he was before culture was developed, the man of nature—his symbol for a pre-historic, pre-moral fact, and what appeared so attractive to him was the still unbroken force of nature there, not its bestiality" (op. cit., p. 159)—a statement which only needs correction in so far as Nietzsche had in mind not primitive man in general, but the primitive Aryans. See also Berthelot's article, "Nietzsche," in the Grande Encyclopédie (a notable contrast to the meager misleading article under the same heading in the Encyclopedia Britannica). Thilly remarks, "He [Nietzsche] does not wish to bring back the 'blond beast' of early times" (Popular Science Monthly, December, 1905, p. 721).
p "Manners," in Society and Solitude. Of a similar temper is the remark (in connection with certain political agitations before our Civil War): "If it be only a question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly sort."
q Meyer, while speaking of it as remarkable that the "blond beast," who is this and nothing more, is wanting among the "higher men," whose hypertrophy of single traits is portrayed in the Fourth Part of Zarathustra, adds that after all it is not remarkable, since he is really no higher man, but only the condition or presupposition (Vorbedingung) of one (op. cit., p. 435). What in part misleads the reader is the apparent gusto with which Nietzsche describes the violence of the "blond beast" in the first of the two passages cited in the text. In a similar way Weinel charges Nietzsche with a thirst for blood, or at least with championing an impulse of that sort, because he portrays with astonishing and, for the moment, sympathetic penetration the psychology of the "pale criminal" (op. cit., p. 183; cf. Zarathustra, I, vi). But Nietzsche almost always becomes a part (for the time) of that which he describes—that is, he tries to take an inside view of it. Actually, however, ordinary deeds of blood were as repulsive to him as to any one, and he counsels no uncertain methods in dealing with them—his views of civil punishment really deserve special treatment.
r The following are some of the trying passages: Zarathustra, III, xii, 4, "A right which thou canst seize upon, thou shalt not allow to be given thee." Of this it can only be said that Zarathustra is here speaking to his disciples, who are to take his ideal from the mountain-top down into the world, and that truth and moral commandments and the right to rule do not necessarily rest upon the general assent. Will to Power, §§ 735, 736, the tenor of which is that the weak and sickly may have their one moment of strength in a crime and that this may be a justification of their existence; also, that the really great in history have been criminals, breaking, as they had need, with custom, conscience, duty—knowing the danger of it, yet willing the great end and therefore the means (cf. also Werke, XIV, 78, § 153). As to the first point (cf. also Werke, XI, 250, §216), the view is not unlike Browning's in "The Statue and the Bust":
"I hear your approach—'But delay was beat
For their end was a crime.'—Oh, a crime will do
As well, I reply, to serve for a test.
As a virtue golden through and through."
(Cf. also Nietzsche's reference to Dostoiewsky's testimony as to the strong characters he met with in prison, Will to Power, § 233). In judging the second point, it may not be beside the mark to say that "crime" is a legal category, that "conscience" is a psychological phenomenon not necessarily squaring with the truth of things, that "duty" means felt duty, which may not be what one really ought to do (supposing that there is any objective standard)—does not the Talmud say that there is "a time to serve the Lord by breaking his commandments?" Beyond Good and Evil, § 158, "To our strongest impulse, the tyrant within us, not only our reason subjects itself, but also our conscience; " also Werke, XIII, p. 209, § 482, "No one is held in check by principles." These are primarily statements of fact, and the truth of them is a question for psychologists. It may be said, however, that the last statement cannot possibly mean that man's thoughts, his general principles, may not influence his conduct, Nietzsche giving too many instances of a contrary view (cf. Werke, XII, 64, § 117, quoted ante, p. 175). What perhaps, Nietzsche really had in mind was that "principles," taken abstractly and out of relation to the psychological driving forces, are ineffectual—somewhat as Fichte said, "Man can only will what he loves," or as J. R. Seeley spoke of the expulsive power of a new affection. Will to Power, § 788, "to give back to the bösen man good conscience—has this been my involuntary concern? and indeed to the bösen man, so far as he is the strong man"? This is perhaps the most shocking passage to the ordinary reader, but hardly to one acquainted with Nietzsche's thought and use of language. The böse man is one who is bent on injury or destruction and inspires fear; such men are necessary to the world's progress, in Nietzsche's estimation—both malevolent and benevolent impulses having their part to play. Nietzsche has no wish to give good conscience to the bad (schlechten) man.
CHAPTER XXVI
a The problem is, of course, highly accentuated for Christianity, since to it Almighty Power has made man, and might apparently have given equal energy to all.
b This does not mean that historical conditions determine them, but simply make them possible. Against the former view Nietzsche strongly protests—see ante, p. 355, and Nietzsche's Werke, XII, 189-3, § 412; XIV, 215-6; Twilight etc., ix, § 44. According to Wilhelm Ostwald, many more potential great men are born than actually become so (Grosse Männer, p. iii) .
c Cf. D. G. Mason's remarks about Beethoven: "He was wilful; but it was the wilfulness of a man who knew that he had a great work to do and that he understood how to do it better than any one else" (A B C Guide to Music, p. 127). When some one told Beethoven that a certain harmony in one of his pieces was "not allowed," he answered, "Very well, then I allow it" (ibid., p. 127).
d A somewhat similar point of view appears to be taken by Frank Granger in his Historical Sociology. Nietzsche remarks that in seeking to determine the end of man we are apt to consider him generically, leaving individuals and their peculiarities out of account—but he asks, may not each individual be regarded as an attempt to reach a higher genus than men, in virtue of his most individual qualities? (Werke, XI, 238, § 194).
e The prevailing functional view of man finds expression in F. H. Bradley's Ethical Studies, "We have found ourselves, when we have found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social organism" (p. 148). Bradley even says, "To wish to be better than the world is already to be on the threshold of immorality"; further, "We should consider whether the encouraging oneself in having opinions of one's own, in the sense of thinking differently from the world on moral subjects, be not, in any person other than a heaven-born prophet, sheer self-conceit" (p. 180 f.). This is sufficiently strong.
f From this high point of view, "a man as he ought to be" sounds as absurd to Nietzsche as a "tree as it ought to be" (Will to Power, § 334). Cf. Emerson: "Those who by eminence of nature are out of reach of your rewards, let such be free of the city and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales" ("Plato," in Representative Men). Interesting to note in this connection is the peculiar way in which Nietzsche takes up the early Greek philosophers—his effort being to bring out what in each system is a piece of personality and hence belongs to the "irrefutable and undiscussable" (preface to "Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," Werke, IX, 5-6).
g Cf. the striking description of Sigismondo Castromediano, Duke of Marciano, in G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi and the Thousand, pp. 55-6; and a saying of Maxim Gorky's, "Nothing is so deadly to the soul as the desire to please people."
h In this connection, another "hard saying" may be mentioned: "A great man: one who feels that he has a right to sacrifice men as a field-marshal does—not in the service of an 'idea,' but because he will rule" (Werke, XIV, 65-6, §130). If a feeling of this kind can anywise be justified, it is only as we remember that, to Nietzsche, the great man is himself the highest idea—the supreme values being not outside him, but incorporated in him (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 199). A kindred "hard saying" is, "Do you say, it is the good cause that Sanctifies war? I say to you, it is good war that sanctifies every cause" (Zarathustra, I, x). The thought is plainly that putting forth supreme energy is itself the greatest good. "'What is good?' you ask. To be brave is good. Let little maidens say, 'Good is what is pretty and moving'" (ibid., I, x).
i One thinks of Marc Antony's relations with Cleopatra, in contrast with those of a really great man, Cæsar.
j To this side of Nietzsche's view Berthelot hardly does justice in his admirable critical study, Un romantisme utilitaire (Vol. 1).
k Ecce Homo, III, vii, § 2. In America, "gentleman" has become little more than a synonym for a certain refinement of manners, chiefly of the mild and altruistic sort. Emerson has the old strong conception when he says, "God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy.… The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Cæsar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages" (Essay on "Manners").
l It is a curious reflection on the state of culture in America that scholars as well as others sometimes take these magnates as exemplifications of Nietzsche's "superman" (cf . Wilbur M. Urban, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1912, p. 789).
CHAPTER XXVII
a Meyer (op. cit., p. 451 ff.) raises the question whether by superman Nietzsche had in mind individuals or a collectivity. In a sense one might answer, both: his primary thought was of a certain type of man, irrespective of whether there were one or many of them. Yet however many, they would be more or less independent of one another: a compact society (Heerde) of supermen is inconceivable (self-contradictory).
b Theobald Ziegler, of Strasburg, remarks with a certain complacency that he was the first professor of philosophy to take up Nietzsche in a Seminar, and that his students, all Nietzsche-worshipers at the beginning, were at the end Nietzschean no more (Der Turnhahn, June, 1914, p. 643). But it may be questioned whether average university students are capable of really grasping Nietzsche, so that accepting or rejecting him means little in their case. He is for those who have philosophical training and ripe powers of reflection to start with—for men (in every sense of the word).
c Werke, XIII, 347, § 859. Luther, Niebuhr, Bismarck are given as instances. Cf., on a healthy peasant, rude, shrewd, stubborn, enduring, as the superior type, Zarathustra, IV, iii; also, on the possibility that there is today among the people, and particularly among peasants, more relative superiority of taste and tact for reverence than among the newspaper-reading half-world of intellect, the educated (Beyond Good and Evil, § 263).
d Cf. Werke, XII, 410; 368, § 718; XIV, 263, § 10. In speaking of aristocracy, Nietzsche says that he has not in mind the prefix "von" and the Gotha Calendar—an intercalation for the benefit of "Esel" (Will to Power, § 942). None the less, he holds that aristocracies in general are a fruit of time and training (Joyful Science, § 40; Beyond Good and Evil, § 213); and Ziegler thinks that in admitting this, he becomes reactionary and plays into the hands of the Junker (Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 144)—but surely one may admit the potency of descent and yet allow that the family-process may have a beginning and alas! a degenerate ending.
e As to the carelessness of men of genius in marrying, see what immediately follows the passage from Zarathustra quoted in the text; also Werke, XI, 131, § 418; Dawn of Day, §§ 150-1. The plaint is as old as Theognis that while with horses and asses and goats the attempt is made to perfect the breed, in the case of man marriage for money spoils the race.
f There is even a late utterance of Nietzsche apologizing for nationalism, so far as it is a means of preserving the fighting spirit and continuing the strong type of man (Will to Power, § 729; cf . Werke, XIII, 358, § 882).
CHAPTER XXVIII
a One of the first American publicists to see the natural connection of democracy with an advanced labor-program (if not socialism) was Wayne MacVeagh (see his article "Democracy and Law," New Englander, January, 1887). I may add that the democracy that marks itself off from socialism is apt to be the theory of strong, self-sufficient individuals, as against the natural tendency of the mass, who only become strong by combination and organization.
b Nietzsche admits that socialists may deceive themselves about this, and may even, to put through their ideas, deceive others—the preaching of altruism in the ultimate interest of individual egoism being one of the commonest falsifications of the nineteenth century. Cf. the searching essay of Bernard Bosanquet, "The Antithesis between Individualism and Socialism, philosophically considered," in The Civilization of Christendom. In another passage (Will to Power, § 757), Nietzsche says that modern socialism will in the end produce a secular counterpart of Jesuitism—every man becoming a tool and nothing else, and he adds, "for what purpose is not yet discovered" [he means, of course, "for what rational purpose," since making oneself a tool for an organization that simply protects the tools hardly rises to that dignity]; cf., on this point, the close of Chapter XI of this book.
CHAPTER XXIX
a In Beyond Good and Evil, § 219, an order of rank is spoken of even among things, and not merely among men, and there is a Rangordnung of spiritual states (ibid., 257; cf., however, the reservation in Will to Power, § 931), of problems (Beyond Good and Evil, § 213), of values (Will to Power, § 1006), of moralities (Beyond Good and Evil, § 228)—not to speak of the fact that a morality of any kind involves a Rangordnung, something commanding on one side and something obeying on the other (Werke, XIII, 105, § 246).
b The "Law of Manu" contemplated four classes, the priestly, military and political, commercial and agricultural, and a serving-class (Sudras)—see Twilight etc., vii, § 3, and the extended notes on the "Law of Manu," Werke, XIV, 117-30 (cf. 246-7). In one of his classifications (Werke, XII, 411), Nietzsche himself distinguishes a special slave-class, though according to his prevailing view the third class themselves have the general slave-characteristics. It should be added that the Hindu priestly class corresponds in a general way to Nietzsche's first class; he particularly notes that the Brahmans named kings, though standing apart from political life themselves (Beyond Good and Evil, § 61).
c The upper caste in India was priestly, as noted above, and we understand how Nietzsche could refer to "the ruling class of priests, nobles, thinkers [indifferently] in earlier times" (Werke, XI, 374). Zarathustra, after berating priests and calling them enemies, says, "but my blood is related to theirs, and I wish withal to have it honored in theirs" (Zarathustra, II, iv) .
d Cf. the general saying, "To execute what is great is difficult, but more difficult still is to command what is great" (Zarathustra, II, xxii). I recall an inscription on the gravestone of Schnorr von Carolsfeld in Mariathal, near Brixlegg, in Austria: quo altior gradus eo difficilius officium.
e Beyond Good and Evil, § 29. I give the whole passage: "It is something for the fewest to be independent—it is a privilege for the strong. And he who attempts it even with the best right, but without being compelled, proves that he is probably not only strong, but audacious to the point of wantonness. He ventures into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers that life of itself brings in its train; of these not the least is that no one sees how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated and torn to pieces by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. Supposing that he goes to ruin, it happens so far from the understanding of men that they have no feeling or sympathy for him—and he cannot go back any more, he cannot even go back to men's sympathy any more "! Cf. a passage quoted by Meyer (op. cit., p. 587), which I cannot locate: "How much of truth one can bear without degenerating, is his [the philosopher's] measure. Just so, how much happiness—just so, how much freedom and power!"
f Beyond Good and Evil, §41. I quote practically the whole of this passage: "We must give proofs to ourselves that we are fitted for independence and command; and this in season. We must not avoid our tests, though they are perhaps the most dangerous game we can play, and in the last instance are only tests that have ourselves for witness and no other judge. For example: Not to hang on a person, even one most loved—every person is a prison, also a corner. Not to hang on a fatherland, even if it be one most suffering and necessitous—it is already less difficult to loosen one's heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to hang on a compassion, even if it be one for higher men into whose extraordinary suffering and helplessness chance has allowed us to glance. Not to hang on a science, even if it entices us with most precious discoveries apparently reserved for just us. Not to hang on one's own emancipation, on that blissful sense of the far and unfamiliar which the bird has that flies ever higher, in order to see ever more beneath it—the danger of one with wings. Not to hang on our own virtues and become as a whole a sacrifice to some part of us, e.g., to 'our hospitality'—the danger of dangers for high-natured and opulent souls, who are prodigal with themselves almost to the point of unconcern and carry the virtue of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. We must know how to preserve ourselves: strongest test of independence." Cf. as to the preliminary self-training of the ruler, Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 484, §§ 23-4, 27-8.
g Will to Power, § 713. It is curious to find a counterpart of this conception in the older, shall I say? profounder, theological view of the world as a scene of trial, in which, while many are called, few are chosen. The "chosen," however, as viewed by Christianity, are perfect members of the flock, supreme exemplars of the social virtues, while Nietzsche's "chosen" are those who stand more or less aloof from the flock, acting according to their own, not social law, as autonomous as God, indeed the human counterpart of God.
h Beyond Good and Evil, § 287. Cf. Will to Power, § 940: "Higher than 'thou oughtst' stands 'I will' (heroes); higher than 'I will' stands 'I am' (the Greek Gods)." Also Human, etc., § 210: "Born aristocrats of the mind are not too eager; their creations appear and fall from the tree on a quiet autumn night without being hastily craved, pushed, or crowded by new growths. The unceasing wish to create is common and shows jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something, one really needs to produce nothing—and all the same does very much. Beyond the 'productive' man there is a still higher species." Nietzsche cites the remark of Plutarch that no noble-born youth, in seeing the Zeus in Pisa, would wish to become even a Phidias, or, if he saw the Hera in Argos, would wish to become even a Polyclet; and that quite as little would he desire to be Anacreon, Philetas, or Archilochus, whatever delight he took in their poems (Werke, IX, 150). Great men protect artists, poets, and those who are masters in any direction, but do not confuse themselves with them (Will to Power, § 943). Perhaps it is in this exaltation of being above action that the secret (or a part of it) lies of Nietzsche's relatively low estimate of Carlyle and his hero-worship. On the other hand, Emerson (Essay on "Character") uses a legend which perfectly illustrates Nietzsche's thought: "O Iole! how did you know that Hercules was a god?" "Because," answered Iole, "I was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he conquered whether he stood or walked or sat, or whatever he did."
i Beyond Good and Evil, § 258. Cf. Will to Power, § 898, where after speaking of the equalizing process (Ausgleichung) going on in modern democratic society, he says, "This equalized species needs, as soon as it is attained, a justification: it is for the service of a higher sovereign type which stands upon it and only so can lift itself to its own task. Not merely a master-race whose function is exhausted in ruling; but a race with its own sphere of life, with a surplus of energy enabling it to carry beauty, bravery, culture, manners into their most spiritual expressions; an affirmative race which can allow itself every great luxury—strong enough not to need a tyrannical imperative to virtue, rich enough not to need petty economy and pedantry, beyond good and evil; a hothouse for strange and choice plants." In ibid., 937, he quotes a French emigré, M. de Montlosier, who in his De la monarchie française had expressed the ancient sentiment of his class in an astonishingly frank manner: "Race d'affranchis, race d'esclaves arrachés de nos mains, peuple tributaire, peuple nouveau, license vous fut octroyée d'être libres, et non pas à nous d'être nobles; pour nous tout est de droit, pour vous tout est de grace, nous ne somme point de votre communauté; nous sommes un tout par nous-mêmes." Nietzsche remarks that Augustin Thierry read this in 1814, and with a cry of anger proceeded to write his own book on the Revolution.
j He said in one of his earliest essays ("On the Use and Harm of History for Life," sect. 9): "The masses appear to me to deserve a glance only in three ways: first, as fading copies of great men, made on bad paper and with wornout plates, then as a force of opposition to the great, and finally as instruments for the great; aside from this, the devil and statistics take them"! This is disparagement, but not altogether so.
k Henri Lichtenberger, in one of the most illuminating expositions of Nietzsche's social conceptions yet made, remarks that this is a part of his ethics which Nietzsche has left in the shade ("L'Individualisme de Nietzsche," Entre Camerades, Paris, 1901, pp. 341-57). See also his La Philosophie de Nietzsche, p. 151.
l All this is left out of account by writers, like a critic in the London Academy (June 28, 1913), who speaks of the "overman" as crushing out the weaker masses, and even by Brandes in his first article on Nietzsche (Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1890), who represents him as having only hatred and contempt for the undermost strata of the social pyramid.
m This is a subtlety that appears to escape the subtle Mr. Balfour himself and all who argue for the necessity of an other than naturalistic ethics, if the weak are to be respected; it was perhaps first strikingly set forth by C. C. Everett, in an article, "The New Ethics," Unitarian Review, Vol. X, p. 408 ff. (reprinted in Poetry, Comedy, and Duty, see pp. 287-8).
n Meyer (op. dt., p. 310) thinks that Nietzsche started with the ordinary economic or political meaning of "slave," and then generalized, beginning to do so in Human, All-too-Human.
o When we in America speak of slavery, we are apt to think of what existed in our country, before the Civil War, when a black man had "no rights which a white man was bound to respect"—but this laisser faire or anarchy is not a necessary accompaniment of slavery.
p Cf. Richter (op. cit., pp. 244-5), "Why recommend measures to the weak, by which they preserve themselves? Should not all the weak disappear? This Nietzsche believes that he must positively deny. The mass … will always be necessary in the interest of the strong; … only those who are altogether sickly and crippled in mind and body, who corrupt and disintegrate the species and consequently do not facilitate, but rather render more difficult the producing of the superman, should pass away—for them there is only one virtue: to disappear."
q Cf. William James's references to the world of concrete personal experience as "tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed," to the "vast driftings of the cosmic weather" (Pragmatism, pp. 21, 105)—apparently James could only find relief in experiences of a more or less mystical character (ibid., p. 109, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 380, 388, 422, but see p. 425).
r Cf. Richter's statement of the "moral task" of the weaker; "disregarding their own development (Aushildung), to make possible the production, preservation, furtherance of strong personalities" (op. cit., p. 245).
s That business men, when they go out of business, are often at a loss how to occupy themselves and are most unhappy, is well known.
t A consideration of this sort may explain the extremely contrasted points of view of Genealogy etc., II, § 17, and Werke, XIII, 195, § 430, in commenting on the origin of the state (in the one case force, in the other, reverence being emphasized).
u The passage which Höffding (op. cit., p. 174) quotes as evidence that Nietzsche changed his mind—it is to the effect that the rulers are to win the deep unconditional confidence of the ruled (Werke, pocket ed., VII, 486, § 36)—is not inconsistent with "Herrenmoral," and there are as many strong expressions of the latter doctrine in his later writings as earlier.
v A "Kampf der Kasten," at least at the beginning and latent always, is not, as Höffding thinks (op. cit., p. 175), inconsistent with a "gemeinschaftliches Ziel"—this has been explained in the text. The same may be said of the "hostility" to which Dorner refers. As for the "abyss" or "ditch," of which Faguet speaks, Nietzsche would have it, but at the same time "no antitheses" (see Will to Power, § 891). He expressly mentions as one of his problems, "How is the new nobility to organize itself as the power-possessing class? how is it to mark itself off from others without making them enemies and opponents"! (Werke, XII, 122, §240—the italics here are mine).
w Faguet regards what he conceives to be Nietzsche's idea, that the higher class has held the mass down by force, as historically false, urging that the mass have wished to be governed aristocratically, being essentially aristocratic in their sentiments and in a sense more aristocratic than the higher class itself—since among the latter self-interest may work, while among the mass the feeling is a passion against interest (op. cit., p. 344 f.). Faguet does not do justice to the complexities of Nietzsche's meaning, but he perhaps states an essential truth.
x Cf. the description of the highest man as determining the values and guiding the will of millenniums, rulers being his instruments (Will to Power, §§ 998-9); also the picture of the wise man,
"Strange to the people and yet useful to the people,"
(Werke, pocket ed., VI, 52) .
y We have already found Nietzsche warning against confusing the higher egoism with impulses which, apparently egoistic, have really for their aim a social result (for example, the impulse for the accumulation of property, or the sexual impulse, or that of the conqueror or statesman—see Werke, XII, 117, §230).
z It must be admitted that there is still another difficulty, which is hinted at by Dolson, op. cit., p. 80. The higher individuals, loosed from social bands, may be hostile to one another (cf. Werke, XI, 240, § 198; XIV, 76-7—the mutual hostilities of strong races, as described in Will to Power, § 864, are, I take it, another matter) . For if it comes to physical conflicts, other parts of the society may take sides, and the life of the whole be endangered—one thinks of the Wars of the Roses, and of feuds such as have often existed between noble families. But though such possibilities cannot be denied, Nietzsche's ordinary thought of an aristocracy is of something cohering—indeed, something which makes a principle of coherence and organization for the society to which it belongs: the same men, who, in one aspect of their being, are individuals proper, are, in another, functionaries of (if only to the extent of giving legislative thought to) the society. If then they push their individualistic instincts so far, that they go to fighting one another and jeopardizing the life of the society, they must be restrained. As if envisaging a situation of this general character, Nietzsche once defined it as the problem of the legislator to join together forces out of order, so that they shall not destroy themselves in conflict with one another, and so secure a real increase of force (I follow here Halévy's Vie, p. 341, not being able to locate the passage he cites). He calls it the task of culture to take into service all that is fearful, singly, experimentally, step by step, adding, however, that till it is strong enough to do this, it must fight, moderate, or even curse what is fearful (Will to Power, § 1025; cf. Werke, XII, 92, §182). For, as already explained, temporary hostility to great men may be justified on grounds of economy—they may use up force too quickly, which, if stored, would grow to greater (Will to Power, § 896).
aa In one passage (Werke, XII, 119, §233) Nietzsche even questions whether the ends of the individual are necessarily those of the species, but here I think he means of a given species. The variant individual may be the principle of the possibility of a higher species, or he may be a species (so to speak) all by himself: humanity may present a succession of species, one rising above another.
bb Morality (in the usual sense) regards man as function purely, i.e., so far degrades him—this being said, of course, only from the highest point of view. Cf. Joyful Science, § 116.
cc The question is sometimes raised (e.g., by Höffding, op. cit., pp. 68-9) whether Nietzsche was an Utilitarian. It is a question which has, to one who has felt the new issues which Nietzsche raises, a somewhat antiquated air; all the same we may say that if Utilitarianism is the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number (or of all—each counting for one and no more than one) as the standard, Nietzsche was not an Utilitarian, since he held that there may be individuals who are more important than others, even than all the rest combined. Quite as little was he an Utilitarian so far as this is an eudaemonistic doctrine, for questions of pleasure and pain (no matter how universalistically conceived) have a secondary place with him. But so far as Utilitarianism means that actions are good and bad not in themselves, but with reference to ends beyond them, the highest end being the highest possible development of humanity, Nietzsche was an Utilitarian, for he broke entirely with Intuitionalism (which is little more than uncritical common sense turned into a formal doctrine): nothing to him is good or bad, right or wrong, of itself, or as a divine command, or as an unanalyzable dictate of conscience. At the same time the highest development of humanity is not conceived in social but rather in personal terms—hence the happy characterization of his doctrine by Simmel as Personalism. The actions of the mass, indeed, the mass themselves and all who stop short of being persons, are viewed in an utilitarian light—he speaks of himself in this way ("fearful," yet "beneficent," Ecce Homo, IV, §2); but the supreme individuals are not utilities, being rather the standard by which utility in all else is measured.
dd Nietzsche's view that the flock-feeling (social sentiment) should rule in the flock (society), needs to be emphasized, in view of the common misapprehension of his meaning. I have already noted his strong statement that flock-morality is to be held "unconditionally sacred" [in the flock]. Will to Power, § 132. He protests that higher natures are not to treat their valuations as universally valid (Joyful Science, §3). The question may, of course, be raised whether contrasted valuations are consistent with a common goal, and we may say in reply, (1) that it is not impossible that different classes should move toward the same goal, even if they are not aware of doing so, and (2) that as matter of fact Nietzsche seems to conceive that the mass may have some idea of the final goal and willingly lend themselves to movement in that direction.
ee See Will to Power, § 898, where it is accordingly said that the leveling is not to be hindered, but rather hastened. For a long time the mechanizing process must seem the only aim (Werke, 1st ed., XV, 415—I cannot locate this passage in the 2d ed., from which I quote in general). This, I need not say, is very different from making the process a final aim, as Walter Rathenau seems to do (Zur Kritik der Zeit). There is another version of Nietzsche's general view in Will to Power, § 866, which may be summarized as follows: The outcome of modern tendencies will be a whole of enormous power, the single factors of which, however, represent minimum forces, minimum values; in opposition to this dwarfing and specializing of men, there is needed a reverse movement—a producing of a synthetic, justifying type of man, for whom the general mechanization is a condition of existence, as a sort of ground framework (Untergestell) on which he can devise a higher form of being for himself. He needs the antagonism of the mass, the feeling of distance from them—he stands on them, lives off them. Morally speaking, the mechanization represents a maximum of human exploitation; but it presupposes those on whose account the exploitation has meaning. Otherwise the mechanization would be actually a collective lowering of the human type—a retrogressive phenomenon in grand style. All this in opposition to the economic optimism which would find the sacrifices of all compensated by the good (Nutzen) of all; instead, these sacrifices would add themselves up into a collective loss, and we could no longer see for what the immense process had served. Cf. Faguet's enlargement on the possibilities of the actual coming of a superior race (op. cit., p. 275).
ff An organic connection might even be said to exist between the higher and lower, considered as exceptions and the rule. "What I contend against: that an exceptional type should make war on the rule, instead of realizing that the continuance of the rule is the presupposition for the value of the exception" (Will to Power, §894); he gives as illustration women with extraordinary desire for knowledge, who, instead of feeling the distinction that this brings, wish to change the position of women in general.
CHAPTER XXX
a Nietzsche is similarly classed with "anarchists, ego-worshipers, rebels to law and order" in the Quarterly Review (October, 1896, p. 318). Also Ludwig Stein speaks of his "anarchistic-aristocratic theory" (Friedrich Nietzsche's Weltschaming und ihre Gefahren, p. 167)—cf. Kurt Breysig's view, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, XX (1896), pp. 4-14, but also the admissions on p. 16.
b Griechische Kulturgeschichte, Til, 378-9, " The decisive and notable thing in it [philosophy among the Greeks] is the rise of a class of free, independent men in the despotic polis. The philosophers do not become employees and officials of the polis; they willingly withdraw from it … and over against it and public business and talk, the free personality wins force and opportunity for contemplation."
c Cf. Mazzini's description of Austria as "not a nation, but a system of government," and a casual remark of Nietzsche to his sister after hearing some patriotic songs, "Fatherland is to be sure something other than state" (Hamburgischer Correspondent, September 15, 1914, p. 2). Similarly R. M. MacIver speaks of the Roman Empire as "not a society, not a living thing, but an imposed system, an institution" (International Journal of Ethics, January, 1913, p. 134). Meyer explains Nietzsche's antagonism to the state, to the extent it existed, as due partly to the circumstances and tendencies of the time, and maintains that he always thought of the organization of society as realizing itself through essentially political forms (op. cit., pp. 24-6, and 441).
d Only from a similar point of view, i.e., because he placed the Poles high in the scale of rank, can I account for the opinion once expressed that their political unruliness and weakness, even their extravagances, indicate their superiority rather than anything else (Werke, XII, 198, §421).
e I may refer in this connection to my little book. Anarchy or government? An Inquiry in Fundamental Politics (1895).
f As bearing on the future of marriage he proposes in one place heavier inheritance taxes, also a longer period of military duty, on bachelors; special privileges for fathers who bring a goodly number of boys into the world, in certain circumstances the right to cast several votes; a medical record to precede every marriage and be signed by the communal authorities (in which a variety of questions by the parties and the physicians are to be answered, "family history"); as an antidote to prostitution (or an ennobling transformation of it) the legalizing of marriages for given terms (a year, a month), with guarantees for the children; every marriage answered for and recommended by a certain number of trustworthy men in the community, as a community affair (Will to Power, § 733).
g Nietzsche found the literary class as well as the political parties and the socialists repulsive (Werke, XIV, 358, § 223; cf. the reference to the literary class who "live" off their opinions, ibid., 357, § 222; also Joyful Science, § 366); and Berthelot comments on his opposition to the conservatives and reactionaries who were only bent on retaining their material goods and maintaining Christian morality (Grande Eycyclopédie, art. "Nietzsche"). Ironically enough, in Germany the literary class and artists seem to have been most affected by Nietzsche—probably through admiration for his qualities of style rather than from any considerable understanding of his thought.
h It may be said, however, that a united Europe was once a possibility at the hands of another Frenchman, earlier than Napoleon—Henry IV, who had an end put to his career by the dagger of Ravaillac.