NIETZSCHE THE THINKER A STUDY BY WILLIAM MACKINTIRE SALTER ^ Author of First Steps in Philosophy and Anarchy or Government? An Inquiry in Fundamental Politics NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1917 ^ >\ Copyright, 1917, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY S THE OUINN 4 BOOEN CO. PRE8S HANWAV, N. i. 1338 . 5 TO flD. (5, S* HELPER AND CHEERER IN LONELY WAYS AND STUDIES OCT 2 1917 PREFACE Criticism of Nietzsche is rife, understanding rare; this book is a contribution to the understanding of him. At the same time I have tried not merely to restate his thoughts, but to re-think them, using more or less my own language. To enable those interested to judge of the correctness of the interpreta- tion, the original passages are referred to almost constantly. I limit myself to his fundamental points of view — noting only in passing or not at all his thoughts on education, his later views of art and music, his conception of woman, his inter- pretation of Christianity and attitude to religion. If I differ from some who have written in English upon him, it is partly in a sense of the difficulty and delicacy of the undertaking. Few appear to have thought it worth while to study Nietzsche — the treatment he commonly receives is (to use an expressive German word, for which I know no good short equivalent) "plump." If I should be myself found — by those who know — to have simplified him at times too much and not done justice to all his nuances, I should not protest and only hope that some day some one will do better. The book was in substance written before the present Euro- pean War, and without a thought of such a monstrous possibility. It has become the fashion to connect Nietzsche closely with it. One American professor has even called it — the German side of it — " Nietzsche in Action" and an early book by a group of Oxford scholars, Why We Are at War, was advertised under the heading ' ' The Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War." But as matter of fact, the war would probably have arisen about as it did and been conducted about as it has been, had he never existed; and so far as I can find him touching it in any special way, it is as a diagnosti- cian of the general conditions which appear to have given birth to it — i.e., what he calls " Europe's system of small states and small politics" (in contrast to a united Europe and a vi PREFACE great politics, on which he set his heart), ''this nevrose na- tionale with which Europe is sick/' "this sickness and un- reason which is the strongest force against culture that exists, nationalism," for perpetuating which he holds Germans largely [perhaps too much] responsible, and "which with the founding of the German Empire passed into a critical state" (Ecce Homo, XII, x, §2-, Twilight of the Idols, ix, §39). These last words may perhaps be said to suggest some such catastrophe as has now taken place, and I know of no other passage that foreshadows it more particularly. I have dealt with the subject in a special article elsewhere ("Nietzsche and the War," International Journal of Ethics, April, 1917). That our own country has now been drawn — forced — into the maelstrom does not alter its essential character. As to the final disposition of Nietzsche, I offer no counsels now, and really, as intimated, counsels — criticism, such as it is — abound. Even one's newspaper will usually put him in his place! Or, if one wishes a book, Mr. Paul Elmer More's Nietz- sche, "compact as David's pebble," will serve, the Harvard Graduates' Magazine tells us, "to slay the Nietzschean giant," and if we desire heavier blows, — I will not say they are more skilful — we may take up Dr. Paul Carus's Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism. What, however, does not seem to abound is knowledge of the object slain, or to be slain, i.e., some elementary and measurably clear idea of who, or rather what, Nietzsche was, particularly in his underlying points of view. And even the present fresh attempt in this direction — for others have preceded me, notably Dr. Dolson, Mr. Ludovici, Miss Ham- blen, Dr. Chatterton-Hill, Dr. A. Wolf, author of the best extant monograph on Nietzsche, and Professor H. L. Stewart, whose eye, however, is rather too much on present controversial issues for scientific purposes — would be a work of supererogation, had Nietzsche ever given us an epitome of his thinking himself, or were Professor Raoul Richter's masterly Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leoen und sein Werk translated into English, or were Professor Henri Lichtenberger's admirable La Philosophic de Nietzsche, which has been translated, a little more extended and thoroughgoing — at least, my book could then only beg consideration from Americans as a piece of "home industry." PREFACE vii As for criticism — unquestionably the thing of final moment in relation to every thinker — if I can only help to make it in this case a little more intelligent in the future, I shall for the present be satisfied. I owe thanks to Mr. Thomas Common of Corstorphine, Scot- land — perhaps the first English-speaking Nietzsche scholar of our day, ''first" in both senses of the word — for help in locating passages from the Works, which I omitted to note the source of in first coming upon them and could not afterward find, or which I came upon in other writers on Nietzsche. Unfortunately a few remain unlocated — also some from the Briefe. Acknowledgments are due to the editors of The Hibbert Journal, The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, and Mind for permission to use ma- terial which originally appeared as articles in those periodicals. Though gratefully recognizing the enterprise of Dr. Oscar Levy in making possible an English translation of the greater part of Nietzsche's Werke, I have used the original German editions, making my own translations or versions — save of poetical passages, where I have been glad to follow, with his permission, Mr. Common. I cite, however, as far as possible, by paragraph or section, the same in the Werke (both octavo and pocket editions) and the English, French, and other trans- lations; the posthumous material, except Will to Power and Ecce Homo, I am obliged to cite by volume and page of the German octavo edition (vols. IX-XIV inclusive — the second eds. of IX to XII), where alone it appears in full. I have also drawn on Nietzsche's Briefe (6 vols.). The recently published Philologica (3 vols.), principally records of his University teaching, I have practically left unutilized. The numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) in the text refer to the bottom of the page, the letters (a, b, c, etc.) to notes at the end of the book. <( Werke means the octavo edition, unless otherwise stated. W. M. S. Silver Lake, New Hampshire, June, 1917. j j CONTENTS INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER PAGE . I Nietzsche's Relation to His Time; His Life and Per- sonal Tbaits 1 II Some Characteristics of His Thinking . . . . 10 III His " Megalomania," Periods, Constant Points of View, Spiritual Ancestry 21 FIRST PERIOD IV General View of the World; the Function of Art . 34 V Ultimate Analysis of the World 45 VI Ethical Views 58 VII Social and Political Ideas 72 VIII Relations with Wagner 78 SECOND PERIOD IX General Marks of the Second Period 92 X General Outlook, and Ultimate View of the World . 101 XI Attitude to Morals 115 .. XII Social and Political Views and Forecasts . . .129 THIRD PERIOD XIII General Character of the Period, and View of the World 148 XIV The Idea of Eternal Recurrence 163 XV Ultimate Reality as Will to Power 182 XVI Criticism of Morality. Introductory 202 XVII Criticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . The Social Function and Meaning of Morality 210 XVIII Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Have Evil and Cruelty No Place in the World? 226 XIX Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Varying Types of Morality 246 XX Criticism of Morality (Cont.). Responsibility, Rights and Duties, Justice 261 XXI Criticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . Bad Conscience, a Moral Order, Ought, Equality 274 ix x CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXII Cbiticism of Morality ( Cont. ) . The " Altruistic " Senti- ments .... 293 XXIII Criticism of Morality {Concluded). Truth as an Obligation. Net Results of the Criticism . . . 314 XXIV Moral Construction. The Moral Aim Proposed by Nietzsche . 332 XXV Moral Construction (Cont.). The Moral Aim and Will to Power 354 XXVI Moral Construction {Cont.). "Persons," or Great Men . . . 380 XXVII Moral Construction (Concluded). The Superman . . 398 XXVIII Social Criticism. Analysis of Modern Social Tendencies 417 XXIX Social Construction. The Ideal Organization of Society 425 XXX Social Construction (Concluded). Political Views and Anticipations 455 Epilogue - . . 474 Notes 475 Index 527 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I NIETZSCHE'S RELATION TO HIS TIME; HIS LIFE AND PERSONAL TRAITS Once when about to give a "Nietzsche" course before a uni- versity audience, those in charge suggested to me — a novice in such situations — that I should begin by considering some of the notable aspects or tendencies of our present civilization which Nietzsche expresses, so as to give a raison d'etre for the course. It seemed to be taken for granted that he reflected the age and was chiefly important as illustration — perhaps as warning. I confess that I was somewhat embarrassed. For what had struck me as I had been reading him was that he went more or less counter to most of the distinctive tend- encies of our time. My personal experience had been of shock after shock. Long before, and when he was little more than a name to me, I had spoken of the idea of getting "beyond good and evil" as naturally landing one in a madhouse; and when I first read him and ventured to lecture on him before an Ethical Society (1907), I could only consider him as an enemy who stood "strikingly and brilliantly for what we do not believe." As afterward I came to know him more thoroughly, I was less willing to pass sweeping judgment upon him, and yet the impression only deepened that here was a force antagonistic to the dominant forces about us. At many points he seemed more mediaeval than modern. He failed to share the early nineteenth century enthusiasm for liberty, and he opposed the later social- istic tendency. He regretted the intensification of the nation- alist spirit which set in among the various European countries 2 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER after the defeat of Napoleon, deeming it reactionary — his ideas were super-national, European. He found retrogression in Ger- many, and belabored the Empire and the new DeutscJitJium. He shared, indeed, the modern scientific spirit, but he could not long content himself with a purely scientific philosophy and de- plored the lapse of German philosophy into " criticism' ' and scientific specialism. Of Darwinism I might say that he ac- cepted it and did not accept it, whether as natural history or as morals, regarding the struggle for existence, unhindered by ideal considerations, as favoring, through overemphasis of the social virtues, the survival of the weak rather than the strong. In the religious field, the tendency today is, amid uncertainties about Christian dogma, to emphasize Christian morality — Nietzsche questioned Christian morality itself. In business relations the time is marked by commercialism and a certain ruthless egoism (on all sides), but Nietzsche, though with an occasional qualification, had something of the feeling of an old-time aristocrat for the commercial spirit; he lamented the effect of our "American gold-hunger" upon Europe; he thought that one trouble with Germany was that there were too many traders there, paying producers the lowest and charging con- sumers the highest price ; he wished a political order that would control egoisms, whether high or low. War, at least till the present monstrous one, has not characterized our age more than others, but there have been wars enough — and Nietzsche found most of them ignoble : trade, combined with narrow nationalistic aims, inspires them — the peoples having become like traders who lie in wait to take advantage of one another ; 1 the present war he would probably have found not unlike the rest. All this, though he held that the warlike instinct, in some form or other, belonged essentially to human nature as to all advancing life, and that in all probability war in the literal sense would have worthy occasion in the future. The fact is that Nietzsche was a markedly individual thinker and lived to an extraordinary extent from within. While it would be venturesome to say that there is anything new in him and a subtle chemistry might perhaps trace every thought or impulse of his to some external source, the sources 1 Thus spake Zarathustra, III, xii, § 21. RELATION TO HIS TIME 3 lay to a relatively slight extent in his immediate environment.* Unquestionably he was influenced by Schopenhauer and by Wagner; but it was not long before he was critical toward them both. Late in life he remarked that to be a philosopher one must be capable of great admirations, but must also have a force of opposition — and he thought that he had stood the tests, as he had allowed himself to be alienated from his prin- cipal concern, neither by the great political movement of Ger- many, nor by the artistic movement of Wagner, nor by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, though his experiences had been hard and at times he was ill. 2b In another retrospection he says that while like Wagner he was a child of his time, hence a decadent, he had known how to defend himself against the fatality. 3 So slight did he feel his contact with the time to be, so imperceptible was his influence, so profound his isolation, particularly in his later years, that he spoke of himself as an "accident" among Germans, and said with a touch of humor, "My time is not yet, some are posthumously born." 4 I cannot make out that his influence is appreciable now — at least in English-speaking countries ; even in Germany, where for a time he had a certain vogue, his counsels and ideas have been far more disregarded than followed — and though in the present war some university-bred soldiers may be inspired by his praise of the warrior-spirit and the manly virtues, men from Oxford might be similarly inspired, if they but knew him. d He has indeed, given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of him ' (I know of but two or three in America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not understand, like ' ' superman, ' "blond beast," "will to power," "beyond good and evil,' " transvaluation of values" — but influence is another matter He has changed nothing, whether in thought or public policy has neither lifted men up nor lowered them, though mistaken images of him may have had occasionally the latter effect, the truth being simply that he is out of most men's ken. a Letters here and elsewhere refer to notes to be found at end of book. 2 Werke, XIV, 347-8, § 202. 8 Preface to " The Case of Wagner." 4 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," § 7, Ecce Homo, III, § 1. 4 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER But because a man, however much talked about, has had slight real influence, having gone mostly counter to the currents of his time, it does not follow that he is not important, even vastly so, and that the future will not take large account of him. I do not wish to prophesy, but I have a suspicion that sometime — perhaps at no very distant date — writers on serious themes will be more or less classified according as they know him or not ; that we shall be speaking of a pre-Nietzschean and a post-Nietzschean period in philosophical, and particularly in ethical and social, analysis and speculation — and that those who have not made their reckoning with him will be as hopelessly out of date as those who have failed similarly with Kant. Al- ready I am conscious for my own part of a certain antiquated air in much of our contemporary discussion — it is unaware of the new and deep problems which Nietzsche raises; and the references made to him (for almost every writer seems to feel that he must refer to him) only show how superficial the acquaintance with him ordinarily is. Far am I from asserting that we shall follow him ; I simply mean that we shall know him, ponder over him, perchance grapple with him — and whether he masters us or we him, the strength of the struggle and the illumination born of it will become part of our better intel- lectual selves. n Although this book is no biography of Nietzsche (save in the spiritual sense), it may be well at the outset to state the main facts of his life, and also to mention some of the striking points in his personal character. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken, a small Prussian village, where his father was a Protestant pastor. His mother was a pastor's daughter — and back of his father on both sides there was a current of theological blood. From his fourteenth to his twentieth year he was at Schulpforta, one of the strictest and best of German preparatory schools. At twenty he went to the University at Bonn, matricu- lating as a student of theology and philosophy. A year later he followed his " great" teacher, Ritschl, to Leipzig, having meanwhile concentrated upon philosophical and philological LIFE 5 study, and producing during his two years there learned trea- tises which were published in the Rheinisches Museum ("Zur Geschichte der Theognidischen Spruchsammlung, " Vol. XXII; "De Laertii Diogenis fontibus," Vols. XXIII, XXIV). While in Leipzig he read Schopenhauer, and met Wagner. His uni- versity work was broken only by a period of military service. Before taking the doctor's degree, he was called to the chair of classical philology in the University at Basel, his philological work having attracted attention and Ritschl saying that he could do what he would. He was now twenty-four (1868). The Leipzig faculty forthwith gave him the doctor's degree without examination. After two years he became Professor ordinarius. He also undertook work in the Basel Padagogium (a kind of higher gymnasium). His acquaintance with Wagner now ripened into an intimate friendship — Wagner living not far away on Lake Lucerne. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, he could not serve his country as soldier, since he had become naturalized in Switzerland, but he entered the ambulance-service. Dysentery and diphtheria, however, at- tacked him — and the after-effects lingered long, if not through- out his life. In 1876, the year also of the Bayreuth opening, and when differences which had been developing with Wagner culminated, he was obliged on account of ill-health to relinquish his work at the Padagogium and in the spring of 1879 he re- signed his professorship in the University as well. He was at this time thirty-five, but to his sister who saw him not long after, he seemed old and broken, "ein gebrocliener, milder, gealteter Mann." His outer movements were thereafter largely determined by considerations of health. He spent the summers usually in the Upper Engadine, and winters on the French or Italian Riviera. He lasted nearly ten years, when he was over- taken by a stroke of paralysis which affected the brain (late December, 1888, or early January, 1889, in Turin). His nat- urally vigorous bodily frame withstood actual death till August 25, 1900. Owing to current misapprehension a special word should be said as to his insanity. The popular impression among us is perhaps largely traceable to a widely read book by a semi- scientific writer, Dr. Max Nordau, entitled (in the English 6 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER translation, which appeared twenty or more years ago) De- generation; in a chapter devoted to Nietzsche it was stated that his works had been written between periods of residence in a madhouse. The legend dies hard and lingers on faintly in the latest writers who have not made any real study of the case. The fact is, that the insanity came, as just indicated, suddenly, almost without warning, for his latest writings are some of his most lucid — and that nothing was produced by him afterward, save a few incoherent notes and letters, written or scrawled in the first days of his dementia. That there are any anticipations of the catastrophe (i.e., signs of incipient dementia) in his books is at best a subjective opinion — indeed it is a view which tends to be abandoned more and more. f Highly wrought Nietz- sche often was, particularly in his latest writings; he said ex- travagant things and uttered violent judgments. So did Car- lyle; so have many earnest, lonely men, struggling unequally with their time ; but insanity is another matter. The causes of his collapse were probably manifold. A few circumstances may be mentioned which may have co-operated to produce the result. Nietzsche himself mentions a decadent inheritance which he had from his father, though he thought it counterbalanced by a robust one from his mother. 5 While serv- ing his time in the Prussian artillery, he suffered a grave rup- ture of muscles of the chest in mounting a restive horse, and for a time his life was in danger. During the Franco-Prussian war, the illnesses already mentioned were aggravated by strong medicines that seem to have permanently deranged his digestion ; in any case, sick-headaches of an intense and often prolonged character became frequent. He had serious eye-troubles (he was always nearsighted), and became almost blind late in life. Strain of this and every kind produced insomnia — and this in turn led to the use of drugs, and of stronger and stronger ones. All the time he was leading the intensest intellectual life. Whether such a combination of causes was sufficient to produce the result, medical experts must judge. Nietzsche himself once remarked, "We all die too young from a thousand mistakes and ignorances as to how to act." 6 6 Ecce Homo, I, §§ 1, 2. 8 WerJce, XII, 117, § 229. PERSONAL TRAITS 7 in By nature he was of vigorous constitution. He had been fond as a boy of swimming and skating, and at the University, until his disablement, was an active horseback rider. At Bonn he appeared a "picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly the same height as Goethe. " g He had strong musical tastes and some musical ability. A tender conscience seems to have belonged to him from his earliest years. When a mere child, a missionary visited his father's parish and at a meeting plead movingly for his cause ; the little Fritz responded with an offering of his tin soldiers — and afterwards, walking home with his sister, he mur- mured, "Perhaps I ought to have given my cavalry!" He was clean both in person and in thought. At school the boys called him "the little parson," instinctively repressing coarse language in his presence. He had a taste of dissipation at the University, but soon sickened of it. The delights of drinking and duelling palled on him, and openly expressed dissatisfac- tion with the "beer-materialism" of his fellow-students, and strained relations ensuing, appear to have had something to do with his leaving Bonn for Leipzig. Once he allowed himself to be taken to a house of questionable character, but became speechless before what he saw there. For a moment he turned to the piano — and then left. h Professor Deussen, who knew him from Schulpforta days on, says of him, "mulierem nunquam attigit" ; and though this may be too absolute a claim, 1 it shows the impression he left on one of his most intimate friends. He was never married. 5 He had, however, intimate relations with gifted women, like Frau Cosima Wagner and Malwida von Meysenbug, and his family affections were strong and tender; so unwilling was he to give his mother needless pain that he strove to keep his later writings from her. He had at bottom a sympathetic nature. If he warned against pity, it was not from any instinctive lack of it. In personal intercourse he showed marked politeness and, some say, an almost feminine mildness. All his life he was practically a poor man, his yearly income never exceeding a thousand dollars. He called it his happiness that he owned no house, saying, "Who possesses is 8 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER possessed ; ' ' liked to wait on himself; despised the dinners of the rich; loved solitude, aside from a few friends — and the common people. Some of the latter class, in the later days of his illness and comparative emaciation in Genoa, spoke endear- ingly of him as "il santo" or "il piccolo santo." He had remarkable strength of will. Once, when the story of Mutius Scaevola was being discussed among his schoolmates, he lighted a number of matches on his hand and held out his arm without wincing, to prove that one could be superior to pain. After reading Schopenhauer, he practised bodily penance for a short time. Later on he asserted himself against the illnesses that befell him in extraordinary fashion, and when he became men- tally and spiritually disillusioned, he was able to wrest strength from his very deprivations. In general, there was an unusual firmness in his moral texture. He despised meanness, untruth- fulness, cowardice; he liked straight speaking and straight thinking. He did not have one philosophy for the closet and another for life, as Schopenhauer more or less had, but his thoughts were motives, rules of conduct. In his thinking itself we seem to catch the pulse-beats of his virile will. Professor Riehl calls him " perhaps the most masculine character among our philosophers." 7 He was not without a certain nobleness, too. He once said, "a sufferer has no right to pessimism," i.e., to build a general view on a personal experience. Nor was he dogmatic, overbearing — in spirit at least; I shall speak of this point later. He owned that he contradicted himself more or less. "This thinker [he evidently alludes to himself] needs no one to confute him; he suffices to that end him- self. ' ' 8 Nor did he wish to be kept from following his own path by friendly defense or adulation. "The man of knowl- edge," he said, "must be able not only to love his enemies, but to hate his friends." 9 In short, there was a kind of unworldli- ness about him, not in the ordinary, but in a lofty sense. I discover few traces of vanity in him (at least before the last year or two of his life), though not a little pride ; he cared little for reputation, save among a few; and he was not ungenerous, 7 Alois Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche, der Kiinstler und der Denker (4th ed.), p- 161. 8 Mixed Opinions and Sayings, § 193. 6 Thus spake Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3. PERSONAL TRAITS 9 saying toward the close of his life that he had difficulty in citing one case of literary ill-will, though he had been overwhelmed by ignorance. 10 I do not mean that his language is not severe at times, unwarrantably so; but he tells us almost pathetically in one place that we must not underscore these passages and that the severity and presumption come partly from his isolation. A lonely thinker, who finds no sympathy or echo for his ideas, involuntarily, he says, raises his pitch, and falls easily into irri- tated speech. k Perhaps I should add that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing has partly a physical explanation. 1 He was able to write only at intervals, and would put down his thoughts at auspicious moments, oftenest when he was out walking or climb- ing ; one year he had, he tells us, two hundred sick days. m Such ill fortune was extreme — afterward he fared better — but he was more or less incapacitated every year. He undoubtedly made a virtue of necessity and brought his aphoristic style of writing to a high degree of perfection — sometimes he almost seems to make it his ideal; it is noticeable, however, that in Genealogy of Morals, in The Antichristian, and in Ecce Homo he writes almost as connectedly as in his first treatises, and he appears to have projected Will to Power as a systematic work. The aphorisms are often extremely pregnant, Professor Richter re- marking that Nietzsche can in this way give more to the reader in minutes than systematic writers in hours. 11 10 Ecco Homo, IV, § 1. 11 Raoul Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leoen und sein Werk (2d ed. ), p. 185. CHAPTER II SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING Nietzsche's life was practically one of thought. Of outer events, " experiences' ' in the ordinary sense, there were few: "we have not our heart there," he confesses, "and not even our ear. ' ' * But to the great problems of life he stood in a very personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others' sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and mind co-operated. ' ' I have written all my books with my whole body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems are." "May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths — let one look at my previous writings. " " These things you know as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I am the wagon itself. ' ' 2 These were private memoranda that have been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally re- lated to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is "impersonal," touching them only with the feelers of cool, curi- ous thought. 3 So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parody- ing of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in effect irony against higher strivings in general — Cervantes, he says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. 4 Some 1 Preface, § 1, to Genealogy of Morals. 2 Werke, XI, 382, §§ 590-2; cf. XIV, 361, § 231. 8 Joyful Science, § 345. * Werke, X, 481, § 1; XI, 106-7, § 332. 10 SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 11 have even been led to question whether Nietzsche was capable of humor. a But there is no need to go to this length. Not only does he give a high place to laughter in his books, not only are there special instances of humorous description to be found there, but colleagues of his at Basel, like Burckhardt and Over- beck, testify to his infectious laughter at their frequent meeting place (" Baumannshohle") , Nietzsche himself owning that he had much to make up for, since he had laughed so little as child and boy. 5 For all this the undercurrent of his life was unquestionably serious, and he cannot be placed among writers who give us much surface cheer. Occasionally he indulges in pleasantries to the very end of relief from graver work — such, for instance, as those which make a part of "The Case of Wagner" (see the preface to this pamphlet, where it is also said that the subject itself is not one to make light about), and those in Twilight of the Idols. In the preface to the latter he remarks that when one has a great task like that of a "turn- ing round (Umwert Jiang) of all values," one must shake off at times the all too heavy weight of seriousness it brings. As his motives in philosophizing were personal, so were the results he attained — some of them at least: they were for him, helped him to live, whether they were valuable for others or not. Referring to certain of his writings, he calls them his "recipe and self -prepared medicine against life-weariness." 6 In a posthumous fragment (perhaps from a preface for a pos- sible book), he says, "Here a philosophy — one of my philoso- phies — comes to expression, which has no wish to be called 'love of wisdom/ but begs, perhaps from pride, for a more modest name: a repulsive name indeed, which may for its part contribute to making it remain what it wishes to be : a philosophy for myself — with the motto : satis sunt mihi pauci, satis est unus, satis est nullus." 7 Sometimes he distrusts writing for the gen- eral, saying that the thinker may make himself clearer in this way, but is liable to become flatter also, not expressing his most intimate and best self — he confesses that he is shocked now and then to see how little of his own inmost self is more than hinted 6 Cf. R. M. Meyer, Nietzsche, pp. 135-6. 6 Nietzsche's Brief e, II, 566. 7 Werke, XIV, 352, § 214. 12 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER at in his writings. 8 He admires Schopenhauer for having written for himself; for no one, he says, wishes to be deceived, least of all a philosopher who takes as his law, Deceive no one, not even thyself. He comes to say at last, "I take readers into account no longer : how could I write for readers ? . . . But I note myself down, for myself." 9 "Mihi ipsi scripsi — so it is; and in this way shall each one do his best for himself according to his kind. " 10 At least this became an ideal, for he owns that sometimes he has hardly the courage for his own thoughts ("I have only rarely the courage for what I really know"). 11 If I may give in a sentence what seems to me the inmost psychology and driving force of his thinking, it was like this : — Being by nature and by force of early training reverent, finding, however, his religious faith undermined by science and critical reflection, his problem came to be how, consistently with science and the stern facts of life and the world, the old instincts of reverence might still have measurable satisfaction, and life again be lit up with a sense of transcendent things. He was at bottom a religious philosopher — this, though the outcome of his thinking is not what would ordinarily be called religious. There is much irony in him, much contempt, but it is because he has an ideal ; and his final problem is how some kind of a practical approximation to the ideal may be made. He himself says that one who despises is ever one who has not forgotten how to ii The question is sometimes raised whether Nietzsche was a philosopher at all. Some deny it, urging that he left no sys- tematic treatises behind him ; they admit that he may have been a poet, or a master of style ("stylist," to use a barbarous word imported from the German), or a prophet — but he was not a thinker. 13 b But because a man does not write systematically, or 8 Brief e, III, 277. 9 Werke, XIV, 360, § 288. " Brief e, II, 567. 11 Ibid., Ill, 274. 12 Genealogy of Morals, III, § 25. Cf. Georges Chatterton-HilPs char- acterization, "Always an essentially religious nature" {The Philosophy of Nietzsche: an Exposition and an Appreciation, pp. 14, 114). 13 So, among many, Paul Carus, Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism, p. 101. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 13 even does not care to, it does not follow that he has not deep- going, more or less reasoned thoughts, and that these thoughts do not hang together. Nietzsche reflected on first principles in almost every department of human interest (except perhaps mathematics). Though his prime interest is man and morals, he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics and the general constitution of the world. Poets, " stylists, " prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their theory of knowledge, do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at times, perhaps is really so. Not only does he express strongly what he thinks at a given time and leaves it to us to reconcile it with what he says at other times, not only does he need for interpreter some one with a literary as well as scientific sense, but his views actually differ more or less from time to time, and even at the same time — and Professor Hoffding is not quite without justification in suggesting that they might more prop- erly have been put in the form of a drama or dialogue. 14 Nietz- sche himself, in speaking of his ' ' philosophy, ' ' qualifies and says "philosophies," as we have just seen. And yet there is co- herence to a certain extent in each period of his life, and at last there is so much that we might almost speak of a system. There is even a certain method in his changes — one might say, using Hegelian language, that there is first an affirmation, then a negation, and finally an affirmation which takes up the negation into itself. Indeed, the more closely I have attended to his mental history, the more I have become aware of continuing and constant points of view throughout — so much so that I fear I may be found to repeat myself unduly, taking him up period by period as I do. 15 The testimony of others may be interesting in this connection. Professor Rene Berthelot remarks in the Grande Encyclopedic, though with particular to the works of the last period, ' ' They are the expression of a perfectly coherent doctrine, although Nietzsche has never made a systematic ex- 14 Harald Hoffding, Afoderne Philosophen, pp. 141-2. 16 I heard of a German book on Nietzsche not long ago — I cannot now remember its title — which disregarded the division of his life into periods altogether. 14 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER position of it." 16 Dr. Biehard Beyer says, "His doctrine does not lack system but systematic presentation, which however also Socrates, a Leibnitz did not leave behind them. ' ' 17 Professor Vaihinger, who writes professedly not as a disciple, much less apostle of Nietzsche, but simply as an historian of philosophy, describes his book by saying, "I have brought the seemingly disorderly scattered fragments, the disjecta membra, into a strictly consistent system." 18 d Nietzsche himself, though ordi- narily too much in his struggles to grasp them as a whole and see their final import, occasionally had a clear moment and looked as from a height upon the sum-total of his work. Writing from Turin to Brandes, 4th May, 1888, to the effect that his weeks there had turned out "better than any for years, above all more philosophic," he adds, "Almost every day for one or two hours I have reached such a point of energy that I could see as from an eminence my total conception — the immense variety of problems lying spread out before me in relief and clear outline. For this a maximum of force is needed, which I had hardly hoped for. Everything hangs together, for years everything has been going in the right direction ; one builds his philosophy like a beaver — is necessary and does not know it. ' ' 19 He once expressed a wish that some one should make a kind of resume of the results of his thinking, 20 evidently with the notion that there were results which might be put in orderly fashion. Professor Kichter describes his own book — the most valuable one on the philosophical side which has been written on Nietzsche — as a modest attempt to fulfil that wish. 21 But why argue or quote? Any one who cares to read on in these pages will be able to judge for himself whether and how far Nietzsche was a philosopher — no one imagines that he was one in the sense that Kant and Aristotle were. in I have spoken of Nietzsche's changes. He is strongly con- trasted in this respect with his master Schopenhauer, whose 18 Art., "Nietzsche." 17 Nietzsches Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe, pp. 34-5. 18 Hans Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph, pp. 4-8. 19 Brief e, II, 305-6. 20 Ibid., IV, 170. 21 Preface to the second edition. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 15 views crystallized when he was still young and varied thereafter in no material point. Only one who changes, he tells us, is kindred to him. ' ' One must be willing to pass away, in order to be able to rise again." 22 It is easy to misunderstand the spirit of the changes. Professor Saintsbury can see little in them but the desire to be different. 23 Nietzsche himself admits that he likes short-lived habits, hence not an official position, or continual intercourse with the same person, or a fixed abode, or one kind of health. 24 And yet the movements of his thought impress me as on the whole more necessitated than chosen. His break with the religious faith of his youth was scarcely from a whim. If one doubts, let one read the mournful paragraph be- ginning, ' ' Thou wilt never more pray, ' ' and judge for himself ffi — or note the tone of "All that we have loved when we were young has deceived us," or of "What suffering for a child always to judge good and evil differently from his mother, and to be scorned and despised where he reveres!" 26 So no one who reads with any care the records of his intercourse with Wagner, can think that he welcomed the final break. Rather was he made ill by it, in body and soul — it was the great tragedy of his mature life. 27 Giving up the ideas of free-will and responsi- bility was not from choice; even the idea of "eternal recur- rence" was first forced upon him. Almost the only region in which he felt free to follow his will was in projecting a moral ideal, and in the moral field itself he recognized strict limits. In general, he not so much chose his path as chose to follow it. He felt a "task," and the "burden" of his "truths." 28 "Has ever a man searched on the path of truth in the way I have — namely, striving and arguing against all that was grateful to my immediate feeling*?" 29 He opposed the artist love of pleasure, the artist lack of conscience, which would persuade us 22 Werke, XII, 369, § 722. 28 George Saintsbury, The later Nineteenth Century, p. 246. 24 Joyful Science, § 295. 25 Ibid., § 285. 29 Werke, XIV, 231, §472; XIII, 220, §525. 27 Joyful Science, § 279, beginning " We were friends and have be- come strange to one another," is supposed to refer to Wagner — I know of few more moving passages in literature. 28 Cf. preface, § 4, to Human, All-too-Human; Werke, XIV, 413, § 293. 28 Werke, XIV, 350, § 207. \ 16 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER to worship where we no longer believe. 30 Nowhere perhaps more than in the religious field does feeling run riot today, nowhere does epicureanism, soft hedonism, more flourish — Nietzsche put it from him. He had the will to be clean with himself, hard with himself — he despised feeling's "soft luxurious flow," if I may borrow Newman's phrase, when the issue was one of truth. He regarded "libertinism of the intellect" as, along with vice, crime, celibacy, pessimism, anarchism, a consequence of deca- dence. 316 Sometimes his dread of being taken in seems almost morbid. For instance, in referring to the feelings connected with doing for others, not for ourselves, he says that there is "far too much charm and sweetness in these feelings not to make it necessary to be doubly mistrustful and to ask, 'are they not perhaps seductions?' That they please — please him who has them and him who enjoys their fruits, also the mere onlooker — this still is no argument for them, but just a reason for being circumspect. ' ' 32 Pleasure, comfort, the wishes of the heart no test of truth — such is hisi ever-recurring point of view. Indeed, instead of there being any pre-established harmony be- tween the true and the agreeable, he thinks that the experience of stricter, deeper minds is rather to the contrary. 33 Some- times his impulse to the true and real is a torment to him, he is hose towards it and declares that not truth, but appearance, falsehood, is divine ; M and yet the impulse masters him. Pos- terity, he says, speaks of a man rising higher and higher, but it knows nothing of the martyrdom of the ascent ; " a great man is pushed, pressed, crowded, martyred up into his height. ' ' ^ He views the philosopher's task as something hard, unwilled, unrefusable ; and so far as he is alone, it is not because he wills it, but because he is something that does not find its like. 36 "A philosophy that does not promise to make one happier and more virtuous, that rather lets it be understood that one taking service under it will probably go to ruin — that is, will be soli- tary in his time, will be burned and scalded, will have to know 80 Preface, §4, to Dawn of Day. 31 Cf. Will to Power, §§ 1041, 42, 43, 95. 83 Beyond Good and Evil, § 33. 88 The Antichristian, § 50. 8i Will to Power, § 1011. 85 Werke, XIV, 99, § 213. 86 Beyond Good and Evil, §212; Will to Power, §985. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 17 many kinds of mistrust and hate, will need to practise much hardness against himself and alas! also against others — such a philosophy offers easy flattery to no one : one must be born for it." 37 Not all are so born, he freely admits, and he speaks of himself as a law for his own, not for all. He even says that a deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood, for "in the latter case his vanity perhaps suf- fers, but in the former his heart, his sympathy, which always says, 'Ah, why will you have things as hard as I?' " M So inde- pendence is to his mind something for few, and one should not attempt it, unless ' ' compelled. " 39 So much did he feel that necessity hedges us about and that we must come to terms with it, that amor fati became one of his mottoes. 40 IV And yet loneliness, and, above all, change in loneliness are not agreeable things, and it is impossible to avoid a sense of insecurity in the midst of them. With all his assurance Nietz- sche knew that his way was a dangerous one, and he had his moments of misgiving. He craved companionship and the sup- port that companionship gives. Once the confession drops from him that after an hour of sympathetic intercourse with men of opposite views his whole philosophy wavers, so foolish does it seem to wish to be in the right at the cost of love, and so hard not to be able to communicate what is dearest for fear of losing sympathy — "Mnc meae lacrimae."* 1 He had accordingly no wish to impose himself on others. He asks youthful readers not to take his doctrines forthwith as a guide of life, but rather as theses to be weighed; he throws the responsibility on them, urging them to be frue to themselves even against him, and saying that so they will be really true to him. 42 In the same spirit he says, " It lureth thee, my mode and speech H Thou followest me, to hear me teach? 37 Werke, XIV, 412, § 291. 38 Beyond Good and Evil, § 290. 36 Ibid., § 29. 40 Joyful Science, §276. 41 Brief e, IV, 35-6. "Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 442; cf. VI, 46, §23. 18 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER Nay! Guide thyself — honest and fair — And follow me, with care ! with care ! " tt He regards it as part of the humanity of a teacher to caution his pupils against himself, and even says that a pupil rewards his teacher ill who always remains his pupil. 44 Knowing from his own experience how difficult it is to find the truth, having become mistrustful of those who are sure they have it, deeming such confidence indeed an obstacle to truth — knowing that one may actually have to turn against oneself in the higher loyalty, he holds those alone to be genuine pupils, i.e., genuine con- tinuers of a teacher's thought, who, if need be, oppose it. 45 He wished his own philosophy to advance slowly among men, to be tried, criticised, or even overcome. He felt that it was above all problems which he presented, and his most pressing pre- liminary need was of help in formulating them — "as soon as you feel against me, you do not understand my state of mind, and hence not my arguments either. ' ' 46 What a sense he had of the uncertainty of his way is shown in a memorandum like this : ' ' This way is so dangerous ! I dare not speak to myself, being like a sleep-walker, who wanders over house-roofs and has a sacred right not to be called by name. 'What do I matter?' is the only consoling voice I wish to hear." 47 He came to have a sense of the problematical in morality itself — just that about which most of us have no doubts at all (whether because we think, or do not think, I leave undetermined). j "Science [positive knowledge] reveals the flow of things, but » not the goal." 48 It has been proved impossible to build a cul- ture on scientific knowledge alone. 49 Hence he says frankly to \ us, ' * This is my way, where is yours ? The way — there is not. ' ' 50 And yet it would be leaving something out of account if I did not add that in following his uncertain, venturesome way, Nietzsche experienced a certain elevation of spirit. It was the mood of the explorer — the risk gives added zest. He some- 48 Ibid., VI, 42, §7 (the translation is by Thomas Common). 44 Dawn of Day, § 447; Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3. 46 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, 441, § 19; Dawn of Day, § 542. 48 Werke, XI, 384, § 599. 47 Ibid., XI, 385, § 603. 48 Werke, XIII, 357, § 672. 49 1 borrow here from Riehl, op. cit., p. 67. eo Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THINKING 19 times uses a word that sounds strange on the lips of a thinker: ''dance." It connotes for him joy, but joy that goes with the meeting of danger and risk. The dancer is a fine balancer, as when one treads a tight rope or goes on smooth ice. He ven- tures, goes ahead on a basis of probabilities and possibilities. Nietzsche speaks of bidding farewell to assured conviction or the wish for certainty, of balancing oneself on delicate ropes and possibilities, of dancing even on the edge of abysses. 51 Some think that by dancing he meant playing with words and arbi- trary thinking/ but it is something, he tells us, that just the philosopher has got to do well — a quick, fine, glad dealing with uncertainties and dangers is the philosopher's ideal and art. 52 In a sense, all movement involves risk, even walking does, and dancing is only a heightened instance. It may be not quite irrelevant to remark that one of Nietzsche's tests of books or men or music was, whether there was movement in them or no, whether they could walk and still more dance; also that he himself liked to think, walking, leaping, climbing, dancing- above all on lonely mountains or by the sea where the paths were hazardous. 53 g He had a kind of distrust of ideas that came to one seated over a book, -and thought he had, so to speak, caught Flaubert in the act, when he found him observing, "on ne pent penser et ecrire qu'assis." 5 * The venturesome element in life, above all in the life of thought, only lent it a new charm. Though at first the large amount of accident and chaos in the world oppressed him, he came to say "dear accident," "beauti- ful chaos." For once he would have agreed with George Eliot, " Nay, never falter : no great deed is done By falterers who ask for certainty." The mind, he felt, reaches the acme of its power in dealing with uncertainties; it is the weaker sort who want the way assured beyond doubt. 55 Because of his variations of mood, it is not easy definitely 61 Joyful Science, §347. One recalls Shelley's words, "Danger which sports upon the brink of precipices has been my playmate." 62 Ibid., §381. 6 » Ibid., §366. Bi Ecce Homo, II, § 1; Twilight of the Idols, i, § 34. 66 Will to Power, § 963. 20 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER to characterize it. Professor Ziegler speaks of him as a "meta- physically dissatisfied" man, and Dr. Mobius has a similar view. 56 Nietzsche once spoke of himself as "profondement triste,." 57 It does not appear, however, that he was tempera- mentally melancholy; Mobius describes him rather as "san- guine-choleric/' 58 and his sister says (despite what I have already quoted) that he was given to playfulness and jokes as a boy — it was his thoughts, his disillusionment about men and things, that saddened him. With the shadow lurking "only around the corner for most of us — a skepticism as to life's value" (to quote Miss Jane Addams) 59 he was only too familiar. Let one read not only the passages I have already cited, but one in TJius spake ZaratJiustra beginning "The sun is already long down," 60 or a description of the proud sufferer, 61 or an almost bitter paragraph on the last sacrifice of religion, namely the sacrifice of God himself. 62 And yet he met his depression and triumphed over it. He suffered much, renounced much — we feel it particularly in the works of the middle period 63 — and yet he gained far more than he lost, and will probably go down in history as one of the great affirmers of life and the world. But his joy is ever a warrior's joy — it is never the easy serenity, the unruffled optimism of Emerson. 59 Theobald Ziegler, Friedrich Nietzsche; P. J. Mobius, Nietzsche, p. 36. 57 Briefe, II, 597. 88 Op. cit., p. 56; cf. Nietzsche of himself, Werke, XI, 382, §587. 69 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, p. 103. 60 II, x. 61 Dawn of Day, § 425. 62 Beyond Good and Evil, §55; cf. Will to Power, §§302-3. 63 See preface, § 5, to Mixed Opinions and Sayings. CHAPTER III HIS "MEGALOMANIA," PERIODS, CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW, SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY Nietzsche is sometimes charged with "megalomania." It must he admitted that he had, at least in sanguine moments, a high opinion of his place in the world of thought, and we should undoubtedly find it more becoming if he had left the expression of such an opinion — supposing there was ground for it — to others. The language is most offensive in private memoranda, in confidential letters to friends, and in the autobiographical notes, entitled Ecce Homo, which at first were not meant for publication and have only been given to the light since his death; still it occurs also in offensive form in a pamphlet and a small book which he published in the last year of his life, "The Case of Wagner," and Twilight of the Idols. Doubtless it would be fairer to Nietzsche to cite the various utterances in the connection in which they respectively belong, or at least at the end of the book after a general survey of his thought had been given, but it is convenient to take the matter up now. I begin with the utterances (I take only the more extreme ones) which he himself gave to the public — only noting that he called "The Case of Wagner" and Twilight of the Idols his "recreations," and that in general they contain, as M. Taine remarked in a letfer to him, "audaces et finesses," l which we need not take quite literally. In one of the passages, after confessing that he is worse read in Germany than anywhere else and is somewhat indifferent to present fame anyway, he says that what he is concerned for is to "get a little immor- tality" and that the aphorism and the sentence, in which he is "the first master among Germans," are forms of "eternity"; his "ambition is to say in ten propositions what every one else says in a book — what every one else does not say in a book." 1 Brief e, III, 206. 21 22 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER In the same paragraph he speaks of his having given mankind "the deepest book it possesses, namely Zarathustra/ f and he adds that he is about to give it "the most independent' ' (proba- bly referring to The Antichristian) } In another passage he says generally that he has given the Germans their "deepest books" — and adds mockingly, "reason enough for the Germans not understanding a word of them." 3 In still another place he urges that German philologists and even Goethe had not com- prehended the wonderful Greek phenomenon, covered by the name of Dionysus — that he was the first to penetrate to its interior significance. 4 a Turning now to the material published since his death, we find him for one thing daring to put Aristotle himself in the wrong as to the essential meaning of tragedy — "I have first discovered the tragic." 5 Even as early as 1881, he confided to his sister his belief that he was the topmost point of moral reflection and labor in Europe. 6 He reiterates the belief to Brandes in 1888, saying that he fancies himself a capital event in the crisis of valuations ; 7 to Strindberg he even says, "I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts." b In Ecce Homo he becomes almost lyric in his confidence: "No one before me knew the right way, the way upwards; first from me on are there again hopes, tasks, ways of culture to be prescribed — I am their happy messenger." 8 He notes of a certain day (30 September, 1888) : "Great vic- tory; a seventh day; leisurely walk of a god along the Po." 9 He feels that he has had, and has been, an extraordinary for- tune, and writes with an extraordinary abandon and an almost childish irresponsibility — explaining who he is, how he has come to be what he is, why he has written such good books, and so on. It is as if he were somebody else and he were telling us about him. Let one note the account of the extraordinary mental conditions out of which the first part of Zarathustra 2 Twilight etc., ix, § 51. 3 "The Case of Wagner," 2nd postscript. 4 Twilight etc., x, § 4. 5 Ecce Homo, I, § 3 ; Will to Power, § 1029. 8 Werke ( pocket ed. ) , VI, xxiv. 7 Brief e, III, 285. 8 Ecce Homo, III, ix, §2; cf. IV, § 1. 8 Ibid., Ill, ix, § 3. HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 23 arose. 10 They were like what prophets and revealers of divine mysteries may be imagined to have experienced in the past; most persons with such experiences would probably be turned into "believers" forthwith. Nietzsche, however, is cool, ob- jective, analytical in describing what he has undergone; it appears simply as a happy, supreme moment in his psycho- logical history — the account may well become a kind of classic for the scientific student of religious phenomena. In- deed, Nietzsche now makes special claims for himself as a psychologist — he is one "who has not his like." 11 In speaking of the seductive, poisonous influence of Christian morality on thinkers, inasmuch as they were kept by it from penetrating into the sources whence it sprung, he says, "Who in general among philosophers before me was psychologist and not rather the antithesis of one, a * higher kind of swindler/ an 'ideal- ist'?" 12 He indicates similar feeling about himself as a thinker in general — ranging himself with Voltaire, whom he calls, in contrast with his successors, a "grand-seigneur of the mind." 13 German philosophers in particular he finds not clean and straight in their thinking — they never went through a seven- teenth century of hard self-criticism as the French had; they are all Schleiermachers — and "the first straight mind in the history of mind, one in whom truth comes to judgment on the counterfeits of four millenniums, ' ' should not be reckoned among them (I need not say that he means himself). 14 He is convinced of his future influence. He is "the most formidable man that ever was," though this does not exclude his becoming "the most beneficent." 15 He speaks of his sufferings, and adds with a touch of humor, ' ' one pays dear for being immortal ; one dies several times while one* lives. " 16 He looks forward to institu- tions where there will be living and teaching as he understands living and teaching — "perhaps there will even be chairs for the interpretation of Zarathastra." 17 His thankfulness to Sils- Maria (where Zarathustra was first conceived) would fain give it "an immortal name." 18 Little signs of vanity escape him. 10 Hid., Ill, iv, §3. "Ibid., IV, §2. 11 Ibid., Ill, §5. "Ibid., Ill, vi, §5. 12 Ibid., IV, §6. "Ibid., Ill, § 1. 13 Ibid., Ill, iii, §1. "Ibid., Ill, ix, §3. " Ibid., Ill, x, § 3. 24 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER Women, he says, like him — all but the unwomanly kind ; 19 people who never heard his name or the word philosophy are fond of him — the old fruit-vendors in Turin, for example, who pick out their sweetest grapes for him. He is pleased with the idea of his being of Polish descent (Poles are to him ''the French among the Slavs") - 20 He is flattered at the thought of devoted readers ; "people have said that it was impossible to lay down a book of mine — I even disturbed the night's rest." 21 His anticipations of the future border on the grotesque. His Transvaluation [of all Values'] will be like a "crashing thunderbolt." 22 "In two years, ' ' he wrote Brandes in 1888, ' ' we shall have the whole earth in convulsions. ' ' 23 Such is what Professor Pringle-Pattison calls Nietzsche's "colossal egotism" — I know no worse instances; he thinks it attained proportions not to be distinguished from mania. 24 It may be so, but one or two things should be borne in mind. The first is Nietzsche's addiction to strong language in general — particularly toward the close of his life. For instance, "Where has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I ; we are all murderers, etc. ' ' K — it is his strong picturesque way of stating what he conceived to be the essential fact as to the course of modern philosophical thought, beginning with Kant. He amplifies the picture of coming "convulsions" by speaking of "earthquakes," "displacement of mountains and valleys." 26 He feels so foreign to everything German, that "the nearness of a German hinders his digestion." 27 He has a "horrible fear" that he may some day be taken for a saint, but he would rather be a Hanswurst — "perhaps I am a Hans- wurst. ' ' 28 Again, "I am no man, I am dynamite. i,2S He even says to his friend and helper, Peter Gast, "I consider you 19 Ibid., Ill, §5. 20 Ibid., Ill, § 2. 21 Ibid., Ill, § 3. 22 Ibid., Ill, x, §4; cf. Brief e, IV, 426. ™ Brief e, III, 321; cf. Ecce Homo, III, x, §4. 2 * A. S. Pringle-Pattison, Man's Place in the Cosmos (2nd ed.), pp. 284-5. 26 Joyful Science, § 125. 26 Ecce Homo, IV, § 1. 27 Ibid., II, § 5 29 Ibid., IV, § 1. 29 Ibid., IV, §1. HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 25 better and more talented than I am." 30 Plainly we have to make some allowance for one who speaks in ways like these. Secondly, he also had moods quite different from those of " colossal egotism." In the letter to Brandes, in which he spoke of himself as a capital event in the crisis of valuations, he immediately added, "but that may be an error — more than that, a stupidity — I wish to be obliged to believe nothing about myself." He had doubts about Zarathustra; when the first recognition of it came to his knowledge, he wrote to Gast, " So my life is not a failure after all — and just now least of all when I most believed it." 31 At another time he confessed to Gast that there trailed about in his heart an opposition to the whole Zarathustra-creation. 32 As we shall see later, he puts forth almost all his distinctive views tentatively, and is rarely with- out skeptical reserves. The fact is that Nietzsche was not naturally a conceited being, and how he developed such a seemingly overweening self-regard, and what was its exact nature, is an interesting psychological problem. He wrote an old student friend, Frei- herr von Seydlitz, who was on the point of visiting him in Sorrento in 1877, "Heaven knows you will find a very simple man who has no great opinion of himself;" yet to the same person ten years later he used language about as strong as that already quoted — though adding "between ourselves. " e How is the development to be explained? So far as I can make out, the order of psychological fact was something like the following: Increasingly with the years Nietzsche became a lonely man — physically, and above all spiritually. d His old masters — Schopenhauer and Wagner — had failed him, and no one came to take their place. It is a mistake to think that he wished no master. His early feeling is shown in "Schopenhauer as Edu- cator," 33 and as late as 1885 he wrote his sister, "I confront alone an immense problem: it is as if I were lost in a forest, a primeval one. I need help. I need disciples, I need a master. It would be so sweet to obey! If I were lost on a mountain, 30 Briefe, IV, 26. 31 Ibid., IV, 150. 32 So F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 176. 33 Sect. 2. 26 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER I should obey a man who knew the mountain; sick, I should obey a physician; and if I encountered a man who could en- lighten me on the worth of our moral ideas, I should listen to him, I should follow him; but I do not find any one — no dis- ciples, and masters still less ... I am alone. ' ' M He says else- where, "Why do I not find among the living men who see higher than I and have to look down on me? Is it only that I have made a poor search ? And I have so great a longing for such ! " ffi Even his thought of a disciple is peculiar. He writes to Peter Gast (sending him a manuscript), "Read me with more distrust than you ordinarily do, say to me simply, this will go, that that will not go, this pleases me, why that does not, etc., etc." 36 Once he makes a disillusioned thinker say, "I listened for an echo [i.e., some real reproduction of his thought] and heard only praise;" 37 but even praise was rare for Nietzsche. So far as his later books were noticed at all, they were put down as "eccentric, pathological, psychiatric," and as a rule they were ignored. Even rare men like Burckhardt and Taine could not really follow them — they had not, he felt, the same inner need with him, the same will. 38 Those who had been friends from youth up became, for one reason and an- other, and not always without his fault, estranged. He writes his sister, "A deep man has need of friends, at least, unless he has a God : and I have neither God nor friends. Ah, my sister, those whom you call such, they were so in other times — but now?" 39 He notes down privately: "No longer does any one live who loves me; how should I still love life!" This was after the publication of Zarathustra, when he also says, "After such a call from the deepest soul, to hear no word of answer — that is a fearful experience, from which the toughest might go to pieces: it has taken me out of all ties with living men." 40 So (probably in the last year of his life), "It is now ten years — s * I cannot locate this passage in the Brief e, and must rely on D. Halevy, La vie de Frederic Nietzsche, p. 314; cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, §27. "Werke, XII, 219, §466; cf. XIV, 358-9, §223. 86 Again I must rely on Halevy, op. cit., p. 334. • 7 Beyond Good and Evil, § 99. 38 Brief e, I, 480, 495-6. 98 Werke, XIV, 305, § 133. *° Will to Power, § 1040. HIS " MEGALOMANIA " 27 no sound any longer reaches me — a land without rain. " 41 He feels shut up, cut off. ' ' How can I communicate myself ? . . . When shall I come out of the cave into the open? I am the most hidden of all hidden things." No longer can he be " elo- quent," he is like a cave-bear or hermit and talks only with himself, his ideas are acquiring a sort of twilight-color and an odor of buried things and of mold. 42 When he comes to Leipzig in 1886, he strikes his old friend, Erwin Rohde, as something almost uncanny: "it would seem as if he came from a country where no man lived. ' ' And yet he does not wish to take his experiences too tragically, does not mean to complain; his way, he is aware, is not a way for most, it is too dangerous; 6 and, as men and things are in Germany at the time, not even the few he hoped for have ears for him, their interests being elsewhere. He tries manfully to accept the situation, though not without some contempt for the general milieu that makes it necessary to do so. 43 Although he has longed and waited for a strong heart and neck on which he could for an hour at least unload his burden, he is now ready for the last (or first) lesson of life-wisdom: to cease expecting; and for the second: to be courteous, to be modest, thenceforth to endure everybody, endure everything — in short, to endure yet a little more than he had endured be- fore. 44 He even thinks that solitude may be useful for him — suspecting that, if a man can endure it, it tests him even more than sickness, i.e., hardens him, makes him great, if he has any capacities in that direction. 45 He had said in Zarathustra, "Away from the market-place and fame, all that is great be- takes itself ; away f rom^ the market-place and fame, the creators of new values have always dwelt." 46 Even the kindness of those who pity the solitary thinker and wish to make him more comfortable, to "save" him from himself, may be mistaken. 47 Just to be himself and apart from the world, may be his highest duty to the world. Not to lead his time, or take a part in its conflicts, but to turn away from it and develop the idea of a 41 Werke, XIV, 355, § 219. 4B Cf. Werke, XIV, 394. * 2 Ibid., 357, §221; 359, §225. "I, xii. 43 IUd., 356-9. 47 Will to Power, § 985. 44 Will to Power, § 971. 28 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER new time, may be the greatest thing. Nietzsche had once put the idea in poetic form : "Destined, 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 world thy beams shall glow : Pity, as sin, thou must not know! Be pure : that duty's all you owe." 48 At moments he could almost exult — at least he could quote the beautiful words of Isaiah, " ' exultabit solitudo et florebit quasi lilium";® and he even said (though, I fear, with something of bravado), "One has no right to have nerves ... to suffer from solitude. For my part, I have never suffered save from the multitude." 50 And yet this "solitary" was bound by the most intimate ties to his kind, and one might almost say that love for his kind was final motive of all his thinking. What was the path of greatness for mankind? — that was his supreme question. How he worked out an answer, and what the answer was, it will be the effort of this book to explain. But with an answer he could not keep silent about it. He had to speak f — the burden was on him. Yes, it was his burden, — no one else felt it,j no one else gave the answer credence. Hence an acutely personal note in speaking of it. Sometimes a message sums up the aspirations of an age: then the individual communicat- ing it is unimportant. Sometimes, however, a message goes counter to an age, or at least speaks to deaf ears; then the individual becomes of capital importance. Nietzsche never separates himself from his word; but in the circumstances the word lent gravity to him. It was well, then, that men should know authoritatively of him, should understand how his won- derful fortune had befallen him, should be let into his inner thought and impulses. As if aware of this, he speaks freely to one or two friends, and he writes the extraordinary auto- biographical notes, Ecce Homo. This last was immediately only for his sister's eyes, who was at the time in South Amer- 48 Werke (pocket ed.), VI, 56 (the translation is bv Thomas Common). 49 Werke, XIV, 414, § 297 (quoting Isaiah, xxxv, 1). 60 Ecce Homo, II, § 10. HIS "MEGALOMANIA" 29 ica. In a letter to her he says, "I write in this golden autumn [1888], the most beautiful I have ever known, a retro- spect of my life, for myself alone. No one shall read it with the exception of a certain good lama, when she comes across the sea to visit her brother. There is nothing in it for Ger- mans. ... I mean to bury the manuscript and hide it; let it turn to mold, and when we are all mold, it may have its resur- rection. Perhaps then Germans will be worthier of the great present, which I mean to make them." 51 Afterward he changed his mind, and decided to print the book. Without doubt, it is a self-glorification, but the glorifying is because of the glory of his message and in view of the peculiar and tragic situation in which he found himself. To how slight an extent he cared for himself otherwise is shown in a memorandum: "For my son Zarathustra I demand reverence, and it shall be permitted only to the fewest to listen to him. About me how- ever, 'his father/ you may laugh, as I myself do. Or, to make use of a rhyme that stands over my house-door, and put it all in a word : " I live in my own house, have nowise imitated anybody else's and laughed at every master, who has not laughed at himself." 52 It is as if he said, "Think of me as you will, but revere my work." Indeed, after finishing Ecce Homo, he tells a friend that now that he has got the record down, people had better not concern themselves any further about him, but about the things for which he lives (derentwegen ich da bin). 53 The fact is, the obtrusion of self was against his instincts. For long years, he testifies, he had not obtruded even his problems on the men whom he met, 54 and now he confesses that his habits and still more the pride of his instincts revolt against writing about himself as he does in Ecce Homo 55 — this though he says elsewhere that a great man may be proud enough to be un- ashamed even of his vanity. 56 g Hence, though vanity and personal resentment may have 61 Werke, XV, x. Bi Werke, XIV, 350, § 208; 412, § 289. 62 Ibid., XIV, 410. 8B See the preface. "Briefe, I, 538. 88 Will to Power, § 1009. SO NIETZSCHE THE THINKER had their part in inducing him to write this strange book, 57 the main motives were deeper. He wanted to make clear who one with his extraordinary fortune was. " People confuse me," he says elsewhere, adding that it would be a great service if some one would defend and define him against these con- fusions ; but, as things were, he had to come to his own help. 58 "Hear me!" he says in the preface, "I am so and so. Above all things do not confuse me with some one else ! " I will only add that though he magnifies himself, it is not as a superman, 11 or as a messiah, or as the founder of a religion, but simply as a bearer of ideas and messenger of a new culture. Indeed, he sharply marks himself off from prophets and founders of reli- gions. 59 His underlying view is different. Men with great thoughts and inspirations in the past have usually attributed these to a Not-themselves, and masked their pride, or lost it, in humility. The divine in man they put outside him. "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto God be the glory," they said in substance. They may have been right, but Nietzsche thought otherwise. To him the ideas that came to him were his very self, the projection of his inmost will, and he, his self or will, was the outcome of a long course of purely natural evolution. This does not mean that he was without piety and reverence, but it was a natural and human piety, the reverence was self- reverence. At the same time the ideas might be detached from hinl individually and live after his self was gone. Indeed, to make them live on, to have them become seeds of a new human culture, was the practical meaning of his aim. Whether he overestimated his ideas and himself is another question. Per- haps he did. But the charge of megalomania or "colossal egotism" does not dispose of him. Others — particularly founders of religions — have spoken of themselves in far more swelling language than Nietzsche ever used; but we do not object to it, if we find it well-based — indeed, we do not call it "colossal egotism" at all. 1 67 Cf. Briefe, IV, 172, and Meyer, op. cit., p. 384. 68 Werke, XIV, 360, § 226. 69 Ecce Homo, preface, §4; cf. Dr. Paneth's remark, quoted in note to Chapter XIII, at the end of this book. HIS PERIODS AND CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW 31 n Nietzsche's intellectual history falls, roughly speaking, into three periods. In the first, he is under the influence of Scho- penhauer and Wagner — the influence of the latter might be almost called a spell. It is the time of his diseipleship — lasting approximately to 1876. In the second, he more or less frees himself from these influences. It is the period of his emanci- pation — and of his coolest and most objective criticism of men and things (including himself) — continuing to 1881 or 1882. In the third, his positive constructive doctrine more and more appears. The early idealistic instinct reasserts itself, but puri- fied by critical fire. It is the period of independent creation. This division into periods is more or less arbitrary (particu- larly so are the dates assigned); something of each period is in every other; but change, movement, to a greater or less extent, existed in his life, and the " three periods'' serve roughly to characterize it. ill Beneath all changes, however, there were, as already hinted, certain constant points of view, and it may be of service to the reader to mention some of them briefly in advance. There was, for example, an underlying pessimism — so it would be ordi- narily called — and yet with it increasingly a practical optimism. Nietzsche felt keenly man's imperfection — more than once he even speaks of mankind as a "field of ruins." 60 One thinks of John Henry Newman's readiness to credit the "fall of man" on general principles, so little did man's state agree with the notion of something Perfect from which he came. Nietzsche's sense of the perfect, however, simply shows itself in projecting a possible semi-Divine outcome of humanity. This, indeed, becomes a supreme and governing idea with him. From its standpoint the callings of men and men themselves are judged. Learning and science are not ends in themselves, nor do the rank and file of human beings exist on their own account. The scholar or man of science is a tool in the hands of one with a sense of the supreme values, the philosopher, 90 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 6, Will to Power, §713. 32 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER and slavery for the mass in some form or other is a condition and basis of higher culture. Culture, as something beyond a state of nature, is ever the ideal; and rule, not laisser faire, is the way to it. It is time to attempt an organization of mankind with the higher end in view. Present national or racial aims must be transcended — a human aim must overtop them ; j and a united Europe is the first step. Yet progress, all real social change, must be slow. "Everything illegitimate is against my nature,' ' Nietzsche once said; he even character- ized the "revolutionary" as a form of the "unreal." A new philosophy is the first requirement, and war, if it comes, must be for ideas. The general standpoint of Nietzsche might be described as aristocratic — Georg Brandes called it "aristocratic radicalism," and Nietzsche said that it was the most intelligent word about him which he had yet heard, 61 k though I cannot help thinking that Professor Hoff ding's phrase, "radical aris- tocraticism, ' ' 62 more nearly hits the mark. I may add that Nietzsche's mood at the end as at the begin- ning was one of hope. He criticised Goethe rarely, but he did so once in this way. The aged man had summed up his ex- perience of life by saying, " As children, we are sensualists; as lovers, we are idealists, who attach to the loved object quali- ties which are not really there; then love wavers, and before we are aware of it, we are skeptics; the remainder of life is indifferent, we let it go as it will, and end as quietists, as the Hindu philosophers did also." Nietzsche quotes the passage and adds, ' ' So speaks Goethe : was he right ? If so, how little reason would there be in becoming as old, as reasonable as Goethe ! Rather were it well to learn from the Greeks their judgment on old age — for they hated growing old more than death, and wished to die, when they felt that they were com- mencing to be reasonable in that fashion." He had been re- ferring to his early attempts to win disciples, and his "impa- tient hopes"; and "now — after an hundred years according to my reckoning of time! — I am still not yet old enough to have lost all hope" — what was gone was his impatience. 63 It was a noble mood — for his hope was ultimately a hope for the world ; so far he too obeyed "the voice at eve obeyed at prime." 81 Briefe, III, 275. 82 Op. cit., p. 160. 63 Werke, XIV, 381. HIS SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY S3 IV Nietzsche felt that he belonged to a spiritual line. He was grateful to those of his own time or century who had influenced him, and to the great spirits of the past whose blood was kindred to his own — indeed he was so conscious of being well-born in this respect, that he did not feel the need of fame. 64 His an- cestry he designates differently at different times. Once he speaks of four pairs of names : Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. 65 At another time he mentions Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau. 66 At still another, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. 67 It is interesting to note that the most constant names are Spinoza and Goethe, the next most constant Plato. Kant is not mentioned. This cannot mean that Kant had not influenced him, though more negatively than otherwise, and perhaps principally through Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange; with Kant's theoretic standpoint he was far more in harmony than with Plato's, but Plato's aris- tocratic practical philosophy appealed to him as Kant's demo- cratic, Rousseau-born ethics did not. Nietzsche confessed that he almost loved Pascal, who had instructed him unendingly; but he thought that Christianity had corrupted his noble intel- lect, though if he had lived thirty years longer, he might have turned on Christianity as he had earlier on the Jesuits. 1 8 * Werke, XII, 216, § 456. 85 Mixed Opinions, etc., § 408. 68 Werke, XII, 216-7, § 456. 67 Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 491, § 57. FIRST PERIOD CHAPTER IV GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD; THE FUNCTION OF ART In passing to the detailed study of Nietzsche's intellectual his- tory, we begin with him in Basel, where he is professor of classical philology at the University. He is happy in his rela- tions with his colleagues, and as a teacher he is uncommonly beloved. Professor Rudolph Eucken, for a time his colleague, recalls his "kind and pleasant manner " in examining students for the doctor's degree, "without in any way impairing the strict demands of the subject-matter." a Jacob Burckhardt, another colleague and well-known for his writings on the Renaissance and Greek culture, remarked at the time that Basel had never before had a teacher like him. b Nietzsche is par- ticularly happy in his intercourse with Burckhardt, who was mucji his senior. He is also happy in a friendship with Richard Wagner, with whom and Frau Cosima he often spends delight- ful week-ends at their villa above Lake Lucerne. His lectures are strictly professional, and only the few devoted to philolog- ical study attend them. At the same time his interests are wide, and he finds him- self wishing to do more than train efficient philologists. 1 The root-problems of life and the world engage him. He has at bottom the philosophical instinct, and philological study be- comes more or less a means to its satisfaction. Greek philology opens for him the door to Greek thought and speculation — enables him, he thinks, to reconstruct more accurately than would otherwise be possible the Greek view of life. The broader outlook appears in a preliminary way in his inaugural address, ' ' Homer and Classical Philology, ' ' and it bore rich fruit in his 1 Werke ( pocket ed. ) , I, xxviii. 34 GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD 35 first published book, The Birth of Tragedy. It shows itself also in fragmentary minor studies — meant apparently for use in a work on Hellenism in general — on the Greek state, the Greek woman, competitive strife in Homer, philosophy in the tragic period of the Greeks (i.e., the pre-Socratic philosophers), all of which now appear in his published Remains. In addition, he writes two brief but pregnant studies of a more general character — one in aesthetics, "On the Relation between Music and Words," another in the theory of knowledge, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense." Aside from all this, he brings his ideas to bear on questions or tendencies of the day, and sometimes makes a decided stir in the intellectual world. It was so with a pamphlet attack on David Friedrich Strauss — and, though not so markedly, with pamphlets on ' ' The Use and Harm of History for Life," "Schopenhauer as Edu- cator," and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." He calls them Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, recognizing that the views he expresses are not in harmony with the spirit of the time. The new Germany after the Franco-Prussian war did not please him — it was too self-satisfied, materialistic, Philistine : the spirit was spreading to the educated classes, and even infected the veteran theologian Strauss. Philosophy was losing its old dis- tinctive character — giving way to history, criticism, scientific specialism. The cause of Wagner, which to his mind held such rich promise for the future, was having to struggle. Education was being perverted. He gave several public lec- tures on the latter topic and outlined more. Notes of this course and memoranda for still another Unzeitgemasse Betracht- ung, "We Philologists," make, along with the books and pam- phlets already mentioned and some private notes, the literary output of his first period. I shall now endeavor to state the general background of thought and feeling in these writings, and I shall follow the same method in dealing with the later epochs of his life. I am aware that in restricting myself in this way, I do more or less violence to Nietzsche. He was above all a creature of flesh and blood, and from my skeleton manner of treatment the reader will get little idea of the richness and varied charm of his con- crete thinking. But my purpose is a limited one, and perhaps 36 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER all philosophy, or study of philosophy, is bound to be "grau" compared with "Lebens Farbe." n First, I may note that Nietzsche gives a distinct place to philosophy. It is not for him merely a vague general term, but has a special meaning. The philosopher is distinct from the scholar or man of science, as well as from the average unthinking run of men ; he is also distinct from the reformer. His impulse is that of theoretic curiosity, but the curiosity is not as to anything and everything, a mere blind undiscriminating appe- tite for knowledge turned loose on the universe; it is curiosity as to things most important, the things worthiest of knowledge.* In other words, in philosophy is already implicit the notion of value, and the philosopher is ipso facto a judge. 6 He is differ- entiated from the scholar as well as the ordinary practical man in that he seeks the great knowledge — the knowledge of the essence and core of things, of the total meaning and tune of the world; his effort is to give an echo to this tune and state it in conceptual form. f " Great" here is determined by the situation of man, the general character and circumstances of his life. As to this, Nietzsche felt much as Pascal had. Round about man, the heir of a few hours, there are frightful preci- pices and every step brings up the questions, Wherefore? Whither ? Whence ? 2 Philosophy is an answer — an attempt at an answer — to these questions; hence its rank. It is above the special sciences — is indeed their ultimate raison d'etre and the judge of their importance. Nietzsche is keenly conscious from the start of the subordinate rank of scientific specialism — as against the tendency to exalt it current in Germany at the time. Nor at first does he seem to doubt that philosophical truth can be got. g At the same time, the philosopher is thinker, judge, legislator, not practical reformer. 3 / The general conception of the world which Nietzsche first reached, however, is different from what most of us are accus- tomed to, and repels rather than attracts. We think — at least most of us try to think — of reason and intelligence as governing 2 " David Strauss, Confessor and Author," sect. 8. 8 " Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 3. GENERAL VIEW OF THE WORLD 37 the world, of justice as its law, and of love as its driving force. But Nietzsche is unable to make out either a rational or a moral government of things. Change and undoing overtake all things, even the best and rarest : what is excellent is no more permanent than anything else. The world seems to him chiefly a blind striving of will, or rather of wills — wills, too, which strive with one another (save within certain limits) and more or less live off one another. He finds little that is worshipful or adorable in such a world (whether as it appears or as it inwardly is)/ Aside from awe before its vastness, it rather awakens pity. In reaching this result Kant's negative arguments against theology had affected him, but -at was the concrete make-up of the world that was the decisive thing — especially what Darwin has brought home to us English-speaking people, and what Schopenhauer had noted decades before. The ''horrible struggle for exist- ence" is often referred to. h The world was undivine. /Nietz- sche even speaks of this later as if it had been a first-hand inde- pendent conviction with him — of atheism as conducting him to Schopenhauer. 4 If so, Schopenhauer simply did him the service of formulating and grounding his conviction — i.e., of tracing back to their ultimate metaphysical origin the pain and wrong of the world, the general contradictoriness and impermanence of things. in How did Nietzsche react to such a view practically ? Careful attention to his various early writings seems to reveal two atti- tudes — taken either at successive times, or, according to his mood, more or less at the same time. The reaction that came first (if there was a first) was like Schopenhauer's own. He wished to renounce life, felt pity to be the supreme law, even inclined to practical asceticism 5 — and with it all had the dim sense of another order of things than this we know, one to which the negation of life somehow conducts. There are several passages of this tenor. 1 The other reaction was strongly con- trasted — it was a disposition to accept life and the world, even if they were undivinely constituted. Why this one came to predominate, it might be hard to say. One consideration and 4 Ecce Homo, III, ii, § 2. 6 Cf . P. J. Mobius, op. cit., p. 58. 38 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER another may have influenced him; but probably at bottom it was for a reason below or beyond reason — because the life- instinct (will to live) imperiously asserted itself in him. / This affirmation of life in face of an irrational and unmoral world comes to be one of the most distinctive things in Nietzsche and should be noticed with some care. It is, of course, totally different from the cheerful acceptance of life which the Christian or the pious theist makes — different also from the temperamental optimism which simply looks on the bright side of things, dif- ferent even from the meliorism which looks for better and better things. Nietzsche, now at least, looks for no radical improve- ment, whether in the world at large or in the fundamental con- ditions of human life. 5 The poignant thing is, that our life, like all other life, exists and maintains itself by violence and wrong. We rob other things of existence that we ourselves may live, as truly as animals do — the best of us are parties to this vio- lence, the very saint could not live off the inorganic elements; if for a single day the race should really hold all life sacred, touching or despoiling nothing, it would straightway come to an end./ That is, Leben und M or den ist eins — living and killing are one. 6 Yes, the higher ranges of human life exist by more or less despoiling the lower ranges. Culture " rests on a horrible foundation. " 7 k It is only possible with leisure, and leisure for some means that others must work more than their share — and those who work for others' benefit rather than their own and have to, are really slaves. The culture of ancient Greece — the fairest the world has known — rested on literal slavery; essen- tially it is always so, is so today, though we may veil the fact from our eyes by speaking of "free contract." And yet to accept life on these terms is not easy and involves inner suffering. Some may feel that culture and the higher ranges of life are not worth the price that has to be paid for them — that if all cannot rise, it is better that none should. Indeed, the feeling may go deeper still, it may extend to the foundations of life itself — if life is necessarily of the general predatory nature described, we may think it better to be done with it altogether. So felt Schopenhauer, and so, at moments at least, Nietzsche. But a deeper impulse — something wild and *Werke, IX, 153, 7 Ibid., IX, 151. FUNCTION OF ART 39 unmoral, if you will — urged him finally the other way. He took, chose life, even at this cost. IV The problem of the easement of existence, however, under conditions like these becomes a pressing one. And here Nietz- sche discovers a vital significance in art. Art is a kind of playing with the world; it consists in seeing it — in part or in iota — as in a play, making a picture or spectacle of it. So far as we follow this impulse, we disembarrass ourselves of our- selves and the world as immediate experience, and view every- thing as outside us, detached from us — we contemplate rather than experience, even the terrible we can look upon undis- turbed. 8 That is, the burden of actual life is momentarily lifted, and we may even enjoy rather than suffer. We may enjoy, though what we see would undo us, were it part of actual experience. It is Schopenhauer's doctrine over again. Still earlier Goethe had stated the essential principle of it: " Was im Leben uns verdriesst Man im Bilde gem geniesst." Nietzsche clings to it now. Art is not a fanciful thing to him, a luxury — it meets a vital need: by it we are helped to go on living. 1 Not only the thinker, the highly organized nature has this need, — all who suffer experience it, and particularly the great laborious mass, too easily tempted to insurrection or to suicide. Nietzsche's preoccupations are now with old Greek life, and he borrows illustrations for his view of art largely from this field.- Particularly does he attend to the religious festivals and the tragic drama. His view of the undertone of life among the Greeks, it should at once be said, is novel — at least to those of us who have our ideas chiefly from Winckelmann and Goethe, and think of "the light gracefulness of the old Greek pagan- ism" (Carlyle), or of their moral and religious life sitting 8 Birth of Tragedy, sects. 22, 24, 25. 40 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER "easily upon them like their own graceful garments' ' (John Fiske). A recent writer even says, "The ancient Greeks seem to have been incapable of taking life seriously. ' ' m But how do views of this sort agree with the spirit of the answer which the legendary Silenus gave to King Midas 's question as to what is best for man ? ' ' Pitiful race of a day, children of accident and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were best left un- heard ? The best of all is unobtainable — not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best is early to die." Yet the answer long lived in Greek tradition, and the substance of thought underlying it is repeated by Simonides and by Soph- ocles. Indeed, how do the common views harmonize with Pindar's somber tone in speaking of the soul as being here in a mortal body because of ancient guilt — or with the ascetic tendencies which we discover in the Orphic cults and in Pytha- goreanism? From considerations of this nature, Nietzsche was led to conclude that there was an undertone of profound seri- ousness and even of pessimism among the ancient, particularly most ancient, Greeks (those before Socrates), and Burckhardt substantially agreed with this view when he characterized the Greek spirit as pessimism in world-view, optimism in tempera- ment. 11 At was then against a somber background that the art of the Greeks had arisen; indeed, Nietzsche held that it was in part just because they suffered as they did, because they felt with such particular keenness the anomalous and prob- lematical in existence, that their art grew to its extraordinary and unique proportions. / His view of Greek art, and particularly of the tragic drama, is of such interest, and hangs together so closely with his general philosophical view, that I shall give some details. 9 The art-impulse which has been described he designates as the Apollinic impulse. Apollo, we remember, was a God of dreams, and under this impulse we see things as in a dream, i.e., detached from real experience. According to Lucretius the 9 The data are in The Birth of Tragedy, to which (dispensing with special references, save in a few cases) I refer the reader. The whole of it should be read, and reread, by one who really wishes to get Nietzsche's point of view — or, I might say, to have an initiation into his way of thinking in general; and I regret to have to say that it should be read in the original — or at least in the French translation. FUNCTION OF ART 41 Gods first appeared to men in dreams, 10 and Nietzsche regarded the Olympian family of deities as a kind of detached glorified vision of the commanding, powerful, and splendid elements in Greek life. They were hardly divine, in our sense of that term, that is, embodiments of justice, holiness, purity — any one who approaches the Homeric pantheon with Christian feelings, he remarks, is bound to be disappointed. The Greek rather saw in that immortal company himself over again and what was great, both good and evil, in his own life and experience, includ- ing the contradictions and tragic elements. 11 / Religion itself was to this extent like art — and it had the emancipating, reliev- ing, reassuring influence of art. The Gods, Nietzsche says sententiously, justified human life by living it themselves — the "only satisfying theodicy.'' There were besides epic narrative and sculpture and painting, all coming from the same picture- making impulse. The things narrated or represented might have elements of terror in them, but when thus projected and separated from actual experience, the main feelings in witness- ing them were of wonder and admiration. This would be the case, even if they corresponded in every single form and linea- ment to the realities they reproduced. Indeed, this kind of art observed the metes and bounds, the definite outlines and forms, of the actual world most scrupulously. But there was another art-impulse, to which Nietzsche gives the name Dionysiac — it is so much "another," that we may hardly see the propriety of calling it an art-impulse at all. Nietzsche's description of it is colored by Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and is not easy to follow for those who are not versed in the latter; but I shall try to make his meaning clear. Dionysus, as is well known, was outside the Olympian circle of divinities. His worship (the rites in his honor) was of an altogether peculiar character. It was not sober, orderly, and decorous, observing metes and bounds, like the worship of Apollo and Zeus, but a more or less riotous thing. There was dancing, and the music of the flute which accompanied it was very different from the music of Apollo's lyre. Exaltation 10 It was in visions and dreams that the Hebrew God appeared to men — particularly to prophets (cf. Numbers, xii, 6). 11 Cf. also Genealogy of Morals, II, § 23. 42 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER came to the worshipers, a sense of oneness with the God, who was imitated in extraordinary acts; the lines which divide human beings from one another p and from the animal world were for the moment obliterated, the feeling of separate indi- viduality vanished, and a sense of universal kinship took its place. It was a state of semi-intoxication, often literal intoxi- cation — Dionysus was secondarily, if not primarily, a God of the vine, and ancient peoples, it must be remembered, often regarded drunkenness as a divinely inspired condition. 11 This was the joyous side of the Dionysian festival. But the joy was of a peculiar sort. It was over against a background that of itself would have bred melancholy and dejection. Dionysus • was a God of change, a God of the destruction involved in ^change as well as of production and fertility, a hunter (Za- greus) bent on slaying, a devourer, a flesh-eater (sarcophagus or ri jujffTijs) ; yes, he was himself a suffering God and the dithyramb, or hymn in his honor, sang his mystical woes. r The joy of the festival was a joy following gloom — and this is the explanation of the excesses that marked it, its orgiastic traits. The winter revealed the God destroying, the spring came as a revelation of his creative power — and the spring was the time of his festival. The worshipers shared both in his pain and his pleasure, iden- tified themselves with the whole round of his life — on the one hand, fasting, hunting, devouring the flesh of wild animals ; on the other, dancing, reveling, and re-enacting his creative fer- tility. 8 It is evident that Dionysus, so taken, was a sort of epitome of life itself, a symbol of the world of change in general, and Nietzsche thinks that his worship had hence the highest significance, since it amounted to a reaffirmation of life in all its range, and a mystical identification of the worshiper with the very spirit of it. In a striking passage he sums up the Dionysiac experience/ substantially as follows: We know that everything that arises must await a painful end, we face the terrors of individual existence and yet are not benumbed, for a metaphysical consolation lifts us above the wheel of change; for a brief moment we become the Primal Being (TJrwesen) himself and feel his uncontrollable desire for and joy in exist- ence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction attending all phe- nomena, seem even necessary in view of the innumerable forms FUNCTION OF ART 43 ever pressing and pushing into life, the boundless fertility of the World- Will ; at the very moment in which we are stung by the pain, we share also in the immeasurable creative pleasure; and so, despite fear and pity, we are happy and kept to life. 1 /The Dionysiac experience is evidently very different from that of the Apollinic dreamer and seer, and the question is, what has it to do with art at all? Nietzsche says that the Dionysiac man is an art-work, not an artist. For he is not so much looking at life as in a picture and finding relief in detaching it from himself, as entering it afresh, re-experiencing its joy and its pain, saying yes even to what is tragic in it. In short, the Apollinic type man looks on life, the Dionysiac relives it... The truth is, the Dionysiac experience is material for art, it is a subject that may be artistically treated — and this is what Nietzsche really (or logically) means," the justifica- tion for his speaking of a second art-impulse being simply that the material has been so used. For out of the Dionysian festival grew that supreme form of Greek art, the tragic drama ; this may be briefly characterized as an Apollinic treatment- of the Dionysiac experience — a marriage of the two. If we fancy to ourselves a worshiper, who has wandered off from the rest in his intoxication and mystic self-oblivion, sinking to the ground for a moment, and, as he lies there, seeing himself and his rapt state and union with the God as in a dream, we have the Dionysiac experience and the rudiments of an Apollinic vision united in the same person. 7 It is just such a blending of diverse elements that lies, Nietzsche thinks, at the basis of Greek tragedy . w The chorus, as is commonly recognized, was the essential feature of the drama, and the chorus is really a transformed band of Dionysus worshipers. They are satyrs, even as the original worshipers dressed themselves in wild costumes to imitate the God. 12 The action on their part is entirely song and dance — the dialogue is an addition, and it is something in which they have no part.* The song is really a transformation of the original dithyramb, "the beautiful song of Dionysus," as Archilochus called it. According to what Nietzsche deems incontestable tradition, the sole subject of Greek tragedy in its very earliest form was the sufferings of 12 Cf. also Erwin Rohde, Psyche, II, 15. 44 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER Dionysus. He thinks that even when Prometheus and (Edipus appear on the stage, they are only a kind of mask for the original divine hero. /I will not go further into details. The essential point in Nietzsche 's interpretation is that the suffering and triumphing God (or world, or man — at bottom all are the same) is seen in vision and becomes a subject of art. The art, however, quite differs from the epos or any form of Apollinic art. The rhapsodist, equally with the painter and sculptor, sees his images outside himself. But in Dionysiac art, the artist and even the spectators of the drama imaginatively identify them- selves with, and become a part of, that which they see. All are for the moment participants in the divine drama spread out before their eyes. / / In these ways, then, according to Nietzsche, the Greeks were helped to live, in face of the tragic facts of the world. One kind of art projected existence in a picture — and there came not only relief, but happiness in contemplating it. Another more daring kind led men, as it were, to live existence over again, to reaffirm even the tragedy in it — change, suffering, death — as a part of the eternal round. This was the most powerful and moving kind of art — in it the Greek found his supreme redemption from practical pessimism. Under the shadow of the Olympian deities, in the presence of great works of plastic art, but above all under the influence of the Dionysian festival and the tragic drama, the pain of existence was transcended, and life ennobled. / CHAPTER V ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD In trying to reach the last elements of the world, Nietzsche manifests two tendencies in the writings of the first period. One is in the direction of metaphysics proper, the other in the direction of positivism or phenomenalism. Probably the meta- physical tendency came first, and he appears to have only gradually worked himself out of it. 1 I shall begin by con- sidering it. Nietzsche was never a materialist. He followed Kant and Schopenhauer in holding that what we call the material world is sensational in nature and subjective.* He criticises Strauss for his superficial treatment of Kant, and for his use of the language of crude realism. 2 b On the other hand, as against the total obscurity in which Kant had left the nature of ultimate reality, Nietzsche thought that he found light in Schopenhauer. Kant had said, summing up the results of his criticism, that the things we perceive are not what we take them to be, that if we make abstraction of ourselves as knowing subjects, or even only of our senses, all the qualities and relations of objects in space and time, yes, space and time themselves, disappear, that as phenomena they can only exist in us — hence what things are independently of us remains wholly unknown. Such an outcome, when it is really taken to heart and not left as an incident in an abstract logical process, is extremely depressing. If one cannot accept Kant's counterbalancing ethical reason- ings, one is left in total gloom — unless, indeed, one becomes a 1 As we shall see, he returns to a modified form of metaphysics in his last period. 2 " David Strauss etc.," sect. 6. 45 46 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER complete idealist and gives up the idea of extra-mental reality- altogether. The depressing influence of Kant's criticism was felt to the full by Heinrich von Kleist — Nietzsche quotes a moving passage from him. 3 He himself, however, escaped it by the help of Schopenhauer. "Ultimate reality proved, indeed, to be very different from what he had been brought up to believe, but he could at least make out its outline, could see his own place in the general framework and find a meaning for his life. To quote the substance of his language, Schopenhauer was a guide to lead him from skeptical depression and criticising renunciation up to the heights of the tragic view, with the heavens and unnumbered stars overhead; once more he ob- tained the sense of life as a whole and learned where consolation was to be found for one's individual limitations and pain, namely, in sacrificing egoism and surrendering oneself to noble aims, above all those of justice and pity. 4 I need not here repeat the fundamental propositions of Schopenhauer's metaphysics which Nietzsche adopted. The reality lying back of the world of sensations, and also of our- selves (to the extent we are distinguishable from sensations), is will — one will, indeed, since space and time, the conditions of multiplicity, are regarded as subjective forms. d The will simply appears in many objects, simply appears in the form of many wills — change, alternate life and death, the general evanescence of things are all but appearance. The view had so far a consoling and elevating effect on Nietzsche: as against the whole realm of the transitory and fugitive, he was able to assert an abiding, eternal energy that was real. 6 But how, it may be asked, under ultimate con- ditions such as these do appearances ever arise? How does it come to pass that the Primal Unity (das TJr-Eine) gives birth to them? At this point Nietzsche is speculative and venture- some even beyond his master, who had only spoken vaguely of a fall (Abfall), and developes a view which stands in marked contrast to theistic, or at least Christian, metaphysics. He premises that the Primal Will, like its human counterpart, of which it is indeed only the inmost essence, is a striving will, that is, something unsatisfied, something that suffers. The dis- 8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 3. * Ibid., sect. 3. ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 47 satisfaction and suffering are that which urge it on. 5 Schopen- hauer once tells of the way in which as a youth he had sought now and then to look at himself and his doings as things apart from him, to make a picture of them — he supposes with the idea of finding them more enjoyable; 6 perhaps the experience has not been his alone. Well, Nietzsche dares suggest that the World-Will is in an essentially similar situation, that it too is led to make a picture, an object of itself, to thus project itself in the form of a vision or dream — and that it is this vision or dream which we and the world are. We and the world are the Eternal One, only not as he exists in himself, but as spread out in space and time for his contemplation — for all objectification requires these forms, at least the form of space, as a condition. "In the dream of the God, we are figures who divine what he dreams.' ' And yet because the vision is a result, is ever being projected and never is, a certain inconstancy and change belong to the world's essential nature — it and all its parts are ever arising, ever passing away, ever freshly arising; there is birth, death, rebirth in it without end. f A fanciful metaphysics, we say, and Nietzsche himself thought so later — and yet, perhaps, not much more fanciful than some other species of the genus. It has points of contact with Fichte's — the World-Will might be called an Absolute Ego who creates all things out of himself; and yet it is essentially different from Fichte's, or any moral metaphysics, and for something at all like it we may have to go back as far as Heraclitus. It might be described as an aesthetic metaphysics (Nietzsche spoke of it afterward as an Artist en-Met a~ physik). 7 The world is there because of an aesthetic need of its creator; and the way in which we in turn must justify it (if we justify it at all) is by conceiving of it aesthetically, converting it into a picture ourselves, repeating thus in principle the act of its creator, experiencing anew his pain and his creative joy. g For we cannot give a rational justification to the world — it did not originate in reason and shows no rational 5 Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 4, 5; Werke, IX, 153; also a later reference to the early view in Zarathustra, I, iii. 6 Schopenhauer's Werke (Frauenstadt ed.), Ill, 425. 7 " Attempt at Self-Criticism/' § 5, prefixed to later editions of The Birth of Tragedy. 48 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER order in its ceaseless play of change and destruction. As little can we give it a moral justification — life lives off life, immorality is an essential part of its constitution. But take it as an aesthetic phenomenon, look at it as a picture, and you may see some sense in it. Eegard its creator not as a Supreme Reason or a Moral Governor, but as a supreme Artist, and you get some real insight into its make-up. For the world is a kind of play, a ceaseless producing and destroying like that of a child making and unmaking his piles of sand for the pleasure of the game, or that of an artist who creates and has ever to create anew. In some such way Heraclitus seems to have viewed the world. The Mon, the eternal child Zeus, was there at play, naiS naiZaov. If, says Nietzsche, Heraclitus had been asked, why the fire did not remain fire, why it was now fire, now water, now earth, he could only have answered, "It is a play — don't take it too pathetically, and above all not morally ! " 8 h n Such was one current of Nietzsche's thinking. But there was another, perhaps at the start simply running alongside of it, but later becoming the main stream. This was in the direction of a renunciation of metaphysics altogether. The turning-point for Nietzsche was as to whether there was actu- ally first-hand knowledge of the will. Schopenhauer had said that while in general we know things only as they appear, we know the will as it is (or at least as mediated through the mere forms of space and time) — know it immediately, by direct self- feeling. But Nietzsche becomes more and more dubious on this point. He asks whether it is not mere ideas, pictures (Vorstell- ungen), which we have here as everywhere else. He thinks that when we look closely within us, we realize that the life of our impulses, the play of our feelings, affects, acts of will, is known to us only through pictures which we form of them, not in their own nature. 9 He hesitates when he comes to pain, but he concludes that here too we have only an image. 10 * Hence we have direct knowledge of reality nowhere. Schopenhauer's 8 " Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sect. 7. Cf. a later reference, Will to Power, § 797. 8 Werke, IX, 214; cf. XII, 25, §43. 10 Ibid., IX, 189, § 129; cf. p. 197. ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 49 "will," while it may be more elementary than other phenomena, is still phenomenal, "the most general phenomenal form of something that is otherwise entirely undecipherable. ' ' u Thus the basis for a metaphysical construction fails altogether, and Nietzsche really falls back into the purely negative attitude that is the outcome of Kant's criticism, from which Schopen- hauer had temporarily delivered him. It is likely that some time was required for this anti-metaphysical attitude to establish itself definitively. He had read as a student at Leipzig Lange 's History of Materialism. — read it twice over, and thoroughly absorbed its leading ideas. One of the characteristic points of view of this remarkable book is that, granting that man cannot know ultimate reality, he may lawfully exercise his imagination upon it in order to satisfy the needs of his heart (Gemuth) — may poetize about it. We find Nietzsche sometimes speaking of philosophy, accordingly, as art rather than knowledge, as kindred to poetry and religion. The essentially Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which has just been described, may have been held by him as poetry in this way, after he had ceased to believe in it literally — as philosophers sometimes do now with the religious beliefs of their youth. There is a fragment belonging to this time, entitled "Critique of the Schopenhauerian phi- losophy," in which, after asserting that Schopenhauer as little as his predecessors had reached the final reality of things, he says that his system has the value of a poetic intuition rather than of a logical argumentation. 3 Indeed, it is possible to hold that Nietzsche never took the Schopenhauerian metaphysics literally, and that his special variety of it, Artist en-Meta- physik, was but a poetic play. The question is one of literary interpretation. The probability seems to me to be that he cherished the belief originally and then felt obliged to modify it, and at last to give it up altogether. 11 In the succeeding period of his life we do not hear of it even as poetry. in In turning away from metaphysics proper, Nietzsche de- velopes interesting, if not absolutely novel, views of the sensible 11 Ibid., IX, 214. Cf. ibid., IX, 108, § 65; 204, § 147; 194, § 137 ("the whole world is phenomenon, through and through, atom on atom, without interval ") . 50 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER world itself. 12 They look in the direction of an extreme phe- nomenalism — one might almost call them, in contrast with our common-sense realistic views, illusionism. What is the relation of a sensation, say a color sensation, to the object that calls it forth ? Nietzsche occupies himself much with the question. He does not doubt that there is an object, i.e., something or other which exists independently of ourselves — his question is simply, does the sensation reveal it, present it as it is? His reasoning is somewhat as follows: Mediately, we have a certain stimulation of the nerve-centers; 13 when this has taken place, somehow the sensation, color, arises. No one supposes that the color has any special resemblance to the brain- tremors that occasion it — what reason, then, is there for sup- posing that it resembles the still more remote inciting cause? 1 We give the sensation a name, i.e., we describe it to ourselves or to one another by a certain sound, but what resemblance has a sound to an actual color ? The two things belong to disparate spheres — all we can say is that the sound is a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the color. But if this is so, why may not the color itself be a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the ultimate object rather than anything else — these two things also belong- ing to disparate spheres ? m Sometimes we imagine that we come nearer objective truth, when instead of mere sensations of things we form concepts of them — we think that we thus leaVe aside their secondary and accidental features and reach their real essence. But what is a concept? It is something we form when, taking a number of comparatively like experiences — sensible or sensational experiences in this case — we fasten our attention on their points of resemblance, leave out of account their differences, and make the resemblances stand out as a quasi-whole by themselves; this then we say they all share in alike, this is their essential idea and the essential being of each particular one. But is this being or idea anything that goes back of the experiences and explains them? Is it not itself 12 Some of them appear in the fragment, " On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 189-207); statements in the text are based on this, when not credited to other sources. 13 Nietzsche here uses the customary physiological datum — as to the qualifications needed from a more ultimate point of view, see note b to this chapter (at the end of the book). ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 51 something sensational in nature, though the sensations are now pictured, thought, rather than immediately felt? — is it more than an attenuated schema of them? Yet if this is so, how do concepts bring us in the slightest degree nearer the objective reality of which we are in search? So far as they are related to it, is it not a poorer, more beggarly relation than the indi- vidual sensible experience itself, since they are constituted just by leaving all that made the experience individual and distinct out of account? What then does our so-called knowing amount to ? To speak of literal correctness, as of a picture to its original, is out of the question. ''First a nervous stimulus turned into an image [e.g., a color]. Metaphor number one. Then the image trans- formed into a sound. Metaphor number two. And each time, a complete leaping from one sphere into an entirely different one." "We think that we know something about things, when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, and in truth we have nothing but metaphors which have no correspondence whatever to the original realities." As for a concept, it is little better than a "residuum" of a metaphor — it is more a skeleton or a ghost, than a real thing; once Nietzsche describes it as the "burial place" of the living experience. Of course, the various concepts in which the varied experiences of men are summed up, may be put in order, and they may make an imposing array, but it is the array of a "Roman columbarium." [One thinks involuntarily, or, shall I say? maliciously, of a Logic like Hegel's."] In other words, and speaking perhaps with offensive plain- ness, our "knowledge" is illusion, falsehood. We stand in an essentially aesthetic relation rather than any other to reality — we are primarily poets, builders, creators. Nietzsche sometimes uses the word "falsehood" (Luge), sometimes "play" (Spiel) — the thought in both expressions is the same. 14 Our "truth" is a "mobile throng of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo- morphisms, in short a lot of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically heightened, translated, adorned, and 14 R. M. Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's use of the word Luge recalls one of Herder's " genialsten " writings, " Ueber die dem Menschen ange- borene Luge." 52 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER after long use seem to a people fixed, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions, the origin and nature of which have been forgotten, metaphors that have no longer the moving effect of metaphors, coins that have lost their image and superscription and now are looked upon as metal, no more as coin. ' ' Concepts have, if not their mother, then their grandmother, in these illusory images. Even ''being," which Nietzsche thinks orig- inally meant " breathing," comes from a metaphor. 15 We do not even know the real nature of our own bodies, nature "has thrown the key away" — we only play or fumble on the surface of things here as everywhere else. IV What then is the human intellect for, if truth is beyond its power ? Nietzsche 's answer in brief is that it is to give us prac- tical guidance in life. It is a useful tool to this end; it did not arise to serve theoretic purposes. It observes how things affect us, noting particularly whether they harm or help us, and draws up from this very personal angle of vision a picture or scheme of things, by the help of which we can thread our way through life's mazes a little more assuredly— conceptualiz- ing and logicizing the material, so that we may handle it more easily. There would be nothing to say against this pictured, logicized world, did we not proceed to take it for what it is not. We think that it is something independent of us, something that would be here in all its particulars just the same whether we were here or not. Color, sound, sweet and sour, hard and soft, heavy and light, we think that we simply find, — that we have no hand in constituting them. I have known people to grow angry when it was suggested that a sound they hear is not something altogether apart from them — so instinctive has the view become. That is, we believe what is not true, we are deceived. It is not deception that is practised upon us — we deceive ourselves; ultimately it is the intellect that is the de- ceiving party. It does its work so thoroughly that we are not aware, unless we critically examine ourselves, that there is any deception in the matter. What conclusion is to be drawn ? Is the deception therefore 18 "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 11. ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 53 to be rejected? By no means. The intellect has worked in the interests of life. It is easier for men to live, when they project their experience outside themselves; they feel that they have thereby something to steady themselves by and to lean upon. Indeed, a tendency to deception exists more or less in life in general. We have all heard of the various protective devices of the lower forms of life; sometimes they are the finest forms of defense, and quite take the place of weapons like horns or poisonous fangs. But the most perfect kind of deception would be that practised by a being on itself, — the real nature of the process being either unrealized, or if realized, soon obscured to the mind. This is the deception which man practises on himself in relation to the sensible and conceptual world. It is all in the interests of life — most men could hardly live without it; and it has as much right to be as truth — indeed more right to be, in the particular circumstances envisaged. Illusion, de- ception, as part of the life-process and legitimate — such is Nietzsche 's point of view at the present time : argument to this effect makes the substance of the pregnant fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral [i.e., theoretic] Sense/' Indeed he has now such a sense of the function of illusion in the world, that he defends it in connections where many of us would feel the sole imperative of truth. For example, in discussing the use and harm of history for life, he questions the benefit for men in general of pushing historical study to its last extremes. If reality is made to stand out in all its naked- ness, if illusions are totally banished, reverence and the power of joyful activity suffer. He has in mind particularly the study of religious origins. He speaks of the dissolving influ- ence of the new historical theology — here is perhaps a sub- sidiary reason for the attack on Strauss. A religion that is turned into a piece of historical knowledge simply is, he thinks, at the end of its way. A loving constructive spirit should go along with all destruction. He is even critical toward modern science in the same spirit. The doctrines of change as a sov- ereign law, of the fluidity of all types and species, of the absence of all cardinal distinction between man and animal, he calls "true, but deadly"; and he thinks that life ruled by 54 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER science may possibly be far less life and far less assured of the future, than life controlled by instincts and powerful illusions. If it came to the worst, if a choice had to be made between knowledge at the expense of life and life at the expense of knowledge, he would not hesitate to give life the higher place — a knowledge that worked destructively on life would indeed in the end destroy itself. 16 The foregoing considerations relate to truth in the theoretic sense. Truth in the moral sense is a different matter. Its origin is utility. Men live in society — have to, to live at all. They must then understand one another ; to this extent at least they must put an end to the helium omnium contra omnes. That is, they must use words in the same senses. When one person says " green " or "loud" or "cow" or "horse," he must mean what others mean by the same words. To speak "truly" is to agree with others, to conform to the general conventions. Language gave the first laws of truth ; here the contrast between truth and falsehood first arose. But the conventions of speech have little or nothing to do with truth in the sense first men- tioned — they had their origin in other than theoretic considera- tions. Speaking "truly" to one's fellow-man involves nothing as to giving a true, i.e., faithfully objective, report of things. German speech attributes a male gender to the tree and a female gender to the plant — how unwarrantable to draw theoretic con- clusions therefrom! In fact truth in the moral (social) sense is entirely compatible with falsehood in the other sense; it means nothing more than that one faithfully uses the cus- tomary metaphors, i.e. (speaking now in more ultimate terms), that one falsifies as the flock does in a way recognized as binding upon all. Yes, the needs of the flock not only cover up theoretic false- hood of the sort described, but they breed, or have bred, illusions on their own account. I have just used the phrase "binding upon all." But anything "binding" naturally brings along with it the idea that those who are bound can heed the obliga- tion, that it is in their power to comply with it, whether they actually do or not — and this idea, when further developed and connected with obedience to the standards of the flock in gen- 1 ° " The Use and Harm of History for Life," sects. 7, 9, 10. ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 55 eral, becomes the notion of free-will and responsibility, which plays so large a part in the spiritual economy of early com- munities. Free-will is an illusory notion to Nietzsche, and indeed to most thinkers of the first rank in recent times (William James being a rare and brilliant exception), yet society for its successful working had to proceed as if it were true. On the basis of it praise and blame, reward and punish- ment were distributed and men's characters shaped (to the extent they were shaped at all), men's own efforts for the better going on the assumption of its truth also. When Nietz- sche speaks of morality as necessary falsehood (Nothlilge) , and says that without the errors connected with it man would have remained on the animal level, he has this error particularly in mind. 17 The field of illusion is thus wide, and the question may be raised, What matters it? If men have ideas to live by, and perhaps grow better by, is that not enough? Well, perhaps it is enough for most of us — we have no impulses urging us to go further, and if we had them, should perhaps only perplex our- selves needlessly in yielding to them, since we have scarcely the leisure or the ability to push our inquiries to a finish. p But there are others who have imperious needs in this direction — they must ask questions, and irrespective of any assurance that they can live by the truth they find: in short, they have the philosophical impulse. Now, whether for his weal or woe, Nietzsche belonged to the latter class — and the only wonder is how he could have the impulse, consistently with his theory of the origin and purpose of the intellect which has just been referred to. There is the same difficulty for us in studying Scho- penhauer, whose view here Nietzsche repeats (on which I have commented elsewhere). 18 In almost every direction we find him seeking the true, irrespective of any advantage to be gained, save the satisfaction of the knowing impulse itself. Particularly does he wrestle — twist and turn — in trying to make out the truth as to the external world. We find him, for instance, considering 17 The view is more distinctly stated in the writings of the second period (cf. Human, Ail-too- Human, §40; The Wanderer and his Shadow, § 12), but it was of earlier formation (cf. Werke, IX, 188, § 129). 18 Article on " Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism," in the Philosophical Review, March, 1910 (see pp. 140-4). 56 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER the fact that a certain sensation or image always follows a certain stimulus, that this may hold of one generation after another, that it may be true of all mankind — it may seem conclusive proof that the image faithfully represents the object it stands for ; and yet he is forced to ask whether a metaphor ceases to be a metaphor because it is indefinitely repeated, and whether, for all that men agree so widely in using it, it is the only possible metaphor in the circumstances. He considers also the argument from the omnipresence and unvarying character of the laws of nature, namely, that since everything in the world, no matter how great or how small, is fixed, certain, law-abiding, fantasy can have nothing to do with it, since if it had, the marks of its arbitrary hand would be somewhere discernible. He admits the plausi- bility of the argument, and yet suppose, he says, that we could experience variously, each of us having our own type of sensa- tion, or suppose that we could perceive now as a bird does and now as a worm and now as a plant, or that where one responded to a stimulus with "red," another did with "blue" and still another with a sound, how then — where then would the uni- formity and law-abidingness of nature be? q Would there not be a variety of worlds — and where would be the world? Is it a wonder that beings of one physiological type have one type of world, and does the present uniform common world prove more than that we human beings are of one type? Does it in t}ie least prove that our responses to stimuli are the right re- sponses, i.e., rightly represent the object? Indeed, what is the meaning of "right" (richtig) in such a connection? — since we have no originals with which to compare them. In going from object to subject, we pass, for all we know, from one sphere of being to another, and there is as little propriety in speaking of a right sensation or image, as of a right sound for a color — we cannot go beyond symbols, metaphors under such conditions. All sensations and images, no matter how varying or even con- tradictory they might be, may be right for the type that makes them, i.e., may serve its special life-needs, and none be right in any final sense. Moreover, the fixity and order of things in our world are a fixity and order in space and time, and Nietzsche holds now (after Kant and Schopenhauer) that these are not independent realities, but forms of our own minds — no wonder ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD 57 then that things appear more or less definitely here and there, now and then; how otherwise could they appear at all? Un- questionably there is a spatial and temporal order, but we our- selves bring the ideas to things that make the order possible. 19 The outcome of all this criticism is, so far as the question of ultimate truth goes, purely negative. At least, after becoming skeptical in regard to Schopenhauer's view that we have a real, first-hand knowledge of ourselves as will, Nietzsche is unable to advance any positive idea of reality at all. All that we are accustomed to call by this name is appearance, illusion. And yet a tentative speculation he does venture upon. It is a kind of panpsychism. We know indeed only our own sensations and thoughts and feelings — but what if the whole world is of this nature ? May not the things outside us [Nietzsche never doubts that there are such things — he is never solipsist or thoroughgoing idealist] be themselves in some sense "centers of sensation"? Even so they might affect one another (each being conceived as a spring of energy). They might get habits by acting and reacting (ultimately from motives of pleasure and pain). They might even be called will. Causality is perhaps an idea formed from the action of the will, particularly as it reacts to stimuli- Space and time in turn hang on causality. And so might arise in general the sort of world we know. 20 It is entirely a specu- lation — and confused and fragmentary at that; but perhaps it should be mentioned in qualification of the sweeping negative language which I have just used. In some ways it is similar to a view which we shall # find developed at length in the latter part of his life. 18 This paragraph, too, bases itself on the fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense." 20 Werke, X, 150-4. CHAPTER VI ETHICAL VIEWS Like Nietzsche 's first metaphysics, his first ethical views reveal the influence of Schopenhauer. In general, the order of the world, including that of human life, cannot be changed. It is not founded on reason, and is but slightly accessible to rational influence. The old rationalism effectually came to an end with Kant and Schopenhauer, who demonstrated the unsurpassable limits of theoretic curiosity, and begot anew the sense of the fundamental mysteriousness of things. A certain deep resig- nation is the practical consequence, a certain frank facing and acceptance of reality in all its forms, including those which are terrible. Instead of science, thinking that it can find the cause of all ills and so can remedy them, wisdom becomes the goal — wisdom, which refusing to be seduced by the specious promises of the sciences, looks unmoved on the world as a whole, and by sympathy and love seeks to make the eternal suffering it finds there its own. This is the atmosphere favorable to the rise of a new and tragic type of culture, similar to that which existed among the Greeks before Socrates and Euripides exercised their rationalizing influence. 1 But because the broad features of the human lot cannot be changed, it does not follow that things may not be better than they are, that there is not something which man may strive for. At bottom Nietzsche was of idealistic temperament, and though this did not distort his vision of reality, it kept him from relapsing into quietism. He felt indeed that the weightiest question of philosophy was just how far the realm of the un- changeable extended, so that knowing this we might set out to improve the changeable side of things with all the courage at our command. 2 We may not be able to do much, and may easily be depressed, but neither becoming rich nor honored nor 1 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 18; cf. sects. 14, 15, 17, 19. * " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," sect. 3. 58 ETHICAL VIEWS 59 learned will lift us out of our depression, and the only sense in striving in these directions is to win power, whereby we may come to the help of nature and correct a little her foolish and clumsy ways. 3 a What then can we do? What shall be our aim? Nietzsche's idealistic temper is plentifully in evidence in the way he gives his answer. We do not get our aim, he says, by studying his- tory, science, or circumstances now existing. In this way we acquaint ourselves with facts: but ethics is a question of our attitude to facts, of the way in which we shall confront them. /He does not like his historical generation, which wishes only to be "objective," which does not know how to love or hate, and perhaps, as in Hegel 's case, turns the historical process itself into a semi-divine affair. He thinks that Hegel's influence was so far harmful on German youth. One who bends and bows to the "power of history" gives in the end an obsequious "yes," Chinese fashion, to every "power," whether it be a government or a public opinion or a majority of heads, and moves to the time which the "power" sets. /Not so morality: it is not merely conceiver or interpreter, but judge — if history says what is or was, it says what should be or should have been. Raphael had to die at the age of thirty-six : was there anything right or rational in such a necessity? Some one was arguing in Germany at the time, that Goethe at eighty-two was worn out, but Nietzsche says that for a couple of years of the "worn- out" Goethe and of such conversations as he had with Ecker- mann, he would give whole wagon-loads of men still running their careers and highly modern at that. That the many go on living, while a few, such as these, come to an end, is nothing but brutal fact, stupidity that cannot be altered — a "so it is," over against the moral demand, "so it should not be." Yes, over against morality! he reiterates; for whatever the virtue we have in mind, whether it be justice, generosity, courage, wisdom, or pity, it is virtuous in so far as it rises against this blind might of facts, this tyranny of the actual, and subjects itself to laws which are not the laws of these historical fluctua- tions. 4 /He reflects in a similar spirit on statistics. " How, 3 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 3. * " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 8. 60 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER statistics prove that there are laws in history? Laws? Yes, they prove how common and pitifully -uniform the mass are: are we to call the operation of gravity, of stupidity, of blind imitation, of love, and of hunger, laws? Well, suppose we do; but if so, it also holds good that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are worth nothing and the history is worth nothing. ' ' y Effect, permanence, success are no real argument. Christianity became "an historical power,' ' but it was because earthly passions, errors, ambitions, survivals of the imperium Romanum, mingled with it, not because of its finer elements, and the purest and truest disciples it has had lived without appreciable results and remain for the most part unknown and unnamed. "Demosthenes had greatness, though he had no success.' ' To speak in Christian language, the Devil is the ruler of this world and the master of results here — he is the prime factor in all the so-called "historical powers," however unpleasantly the remark may strike the ear of those who deify success and baptize the Devil with a new name. 6 No, "let us not expect of the noblest things the toughness of leather." Indeed, not continuance at all, not life and victory, but tragic death may be the highest thing, as we feel on occasion in lis- tening to a Greek tragic drama. 7 All this may be far from a complete statement of the relation of ethics to reality and the temporal order, but it touches cer- tain aspects of the subject, and brings home to us the impetuous earnestness of the young thinker. ii But if our aim is not given to us from without, it must be born from within. The fact is, we human beings judge what we see or learn — we face it with certain requirements. The gist of our requirements we call our ideal, and the ideal, so far as we make it an end to strive for, becomes our aim. Nietz- sche is conscious at the present time of no essential divergence from customary morality, and the ideal he has does not differ from that large vague ideal of good which most of us have, and which, when we hypostatize it, as we commonly do, and 6 Ibid., sect. 9. ° Ibid., sect. 9. T Ibid., sect. 8. ETHICAL VIEWS 61 strip it of limitations, is much the same as the Divine or God. It includes a justice, a love, a wisdom, a power, a beauty — in short, a total perfection — which are only suggested in anything we see or are. A distinction must be drawn between the ideal and the question of its actual embodiment anywhere (e.g., in a Divine Being or Beings) — also, between it and the question whether human life and conduct can actually be shaped in complete accordance with its demands. To both these questions Nietzsche felt obliged to reply negatively. We have already noted that he was atheist; and such in his eyes was the con- stitution of things that human life and action had to fall short of the ideal, and even to go counter to it to a certain extent. So little, however, does this mean that he failed to revere the ideal, that it was in its name that he, with Schopenhauer, pro- nounced the world undivine, and it was because of the sense of a contradiction between what ought to be and what is that pain and distress became so deep a part of his lot as a thinker. There only remained to make the ideal interpenetrate reality to the extent the conditions of existence would allow — and this was what his aim practically came to. It was as if he said, If God does not exist, let us see how near we can come to him. How truly this was the substance of his aim, and how strongly his feelings were enlisted, is manifest in an ejaculation which he imagines a disciple of culture making, and which, I take it, is a self-conf ession : "I see something higher and more human above me than I myself am; help me all to attain it, as I will help every one who feels and suffers as I do : in order that at last the man may arise who is full and measureless in knowl- edge and love and vision and power, and with his whole being cleaves to nature and takes his place in it as judge and valuer of things." 8 In another connection he says, "For what pur- pose the- world exists, why humanity exists, need not for the time concern us. . . . But why thou thyself art here, that thou mayest ask, and if no one else can tell it thee, seek to give a meaning to thy existence as it were a posteriori, by giving to thyself an aim, a goal, a wherefore, a high and noble where- fore. ' ' 9 To state the aim more concretely : since the character- 8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 8 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 9. 62 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER istic impulses of human nature are, as he held with Schopen- hauer, the theoretic, the creative or artistic, and the moral — im- pulses which yield, when they come to any sort of fruition, the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, — the aim is the production, in humanity of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, and not merely as we sometimes find them, but in the fullness and perfection of their idea. We all have in us that which is kindred to these types, and this is why we long for them, and, as it were, see ourselves in them, when any approximation to them passes before our eyes. Yes, they are what nature in a blind way is groping after; they are the final goal of the creative process, the delivering, redeeming agencies not only for us, but for the World- Will itself — if we intelligently strive for them, we to this extent co-operate with nature and help to make up for her shortcomings and mistakes. 10 Such is the perspective in which life is seen by Nietzsche. As most of us live it, it is not its own end;/men, as we ordinarily find them, have no great value on their own account. Striving simply for comfort, happiness, success is a sorry mistake. Our lives have significance only as they reach out after something beyond them. To speak of man's dignity per se, of his rights as man, is to deceive ourselves ; he acquires these only as he serves something higher than himself, as he helps in the production of the "genius" — this being a common term for the philosopher, the artist, and the saint. 11 Life as ordinarily lived is on little more than an animal level. Nietz- sche draws a striking picture of what our histories and sociologies reveal to us — the vast wanderings back and forth on the earth, the building of cities and states, the restless accumulating and spending, the competing with one another, the imitating of one another, the outwitting of one another and trampling on one another, the cries in straits, and the shouts of joy in victory: it is all to him a continuation of our animality, a senseless and oppressive thing. 12 And yet the whole picture changes when he thinks of men as animated by an aim like that which he projects. Then the most ordinary and imperfect would gain significance and worth. Though still ""Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5. " Werke, IX, 164. 12 " Schopenhauer etc., sect. 5. ETHICAL VIEWS 63 aware of their imperfection and owning that nature had suc- ceeded poorly in their own case, they would none the less remember the great end for which she was striving, and, placing themselves at her service, help her to succeed better in the future. 13 Nietzsche conceives that society might actually be pervaded by an aim of this character, that all might unitedly project it; indeed he recognizes that only in this way can the aim be accomplished — the task being too great for individuals/ in When society, or a given society, is inspired in this way, there will come what he calls a culture — this being a general - term for a unity of style in the activities, the life-expressions,, of a people. 14 Existing societies have no culture in this sense (though the French have had one) — the aims of men today are too haphazard, criss-cross ; particularly does Nietzsche make , light of the pretense of a German culture. 15 It is not outward / forms, laws, or institutions that he has in mind, so much as a J spirit, a thought, a vital governing aim. At the same time the aim he proposes is not without definite characters. Not only is it contrasted with the aim of making everybody, or as many as possible, happy, but it is also contrasted with the ambition widely prevalent now of founding or furthering great com- munities (states or empires), which the individual is to find his supreme function in serving. /The community is not an end of itself. There is as much dignity in serving an individual, if he be one of the higher type, as in serving the state: it is not size, numbers, that determine value, but the quality and grade of being. 16 The end of social organization itself is to facilitate the emergence of the higher type or types of man. The ideal community is not one in which the members are on a par, all in turn ends and means, but one in which the higher types are ends and the rest are means to them. The old idea f service — one-sided service, if you will — is thus introduced. The philosopher, the artist, the saint being the culmination of A 13 Ibid., sect. 6. 14 " David Strauss etc.," sect. 7. l * Ibid., sect. 7, "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6, Werke (pocket ed.), II, XXX. 10 "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. I 64 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER existence, social arrangements and activity having normally the production or facilitation of them as their ultimate object, to whatever extent they appear at any given time, they are to be supremely considered, the rest of us finding our highest function jin serving them, rather than in serving ourselves or one another. 1 t must be admitted that Nietzsche parts company thus at the start with the humanitarian, equalitarian, democratic ideals which rule among us today. Once he refers to the processes by which (according to the Darwinian view) progress, the evolu- tion of higher species, has taken place in the animal and plant world. The matter of critical moment, the starting-point for a further development in a given species, has been some unusual specimen — some variation from the average type, to use Dar- win's term — which now and then under favorable conditions arose. Not the average members of the species and their wel- fare, not those either which came last in point of time and their welfare, were of maximum importance or the goal of the species' development, but just these scattering and apparently acci- dental specimens and their welfare, by means of which the transition to a new species became possible, j In the lower realms the progress was unintended and unconscious, but the method by which it was secured may be pursued in higher realms, and just because we human beings are conscious and may have a conscious aim, we may search out and establish the conditions favorable to the rise of our higher specimens and not leave them to come by chance, and so develope along the hu- man line of progress in an unprecedented manner./ Schopen- hauer had said, ' ' Humanity should labor continually to produce individual great men — and this and nothing else is its task," and Nietzsche now repeats it after him. Still more definitely, "How does thy individual life receive its highest value, its deepest significance? Surely only in that thou livest to the advantage of the rarest and most valuable specimens of thy kind, not to that of the most numerous, i.e., taken singly, least valuable specimens. ' ' 17 / The classifying of men as ends and means is not, however, a part of Nietzsche's ideal itself, but a result of the way in which men actually present themselves in the world. Some "Ibid., sect. 6. ETHICAL VIEWS 65 are or tend to become higher individuals, others do not — though it would seem as if all might. Nietzsche himself is involved in more or less contradiction in dealing with the matter. Now he speaks of every one as having the higher possi- bilities, as being essentially individual and unique, 18 now he says that the mass are always "common and pitifully uniform" and that the "modern man" in particular "suffers from a weak personality ' ' 19 — one thinks of Emerson 's plaint with regard to the clergy that they were ' ' as alike as peas, ' ' he could not ' ' tell them apart." 20 Perhaps Nietzsche could only have reconciled these discordant utterances by saying that when an aim takes practical shape, it has to adapt itself to matter-of-fact condi- tions, and make the best of material that is at hand. Sometimes he states his aim as consisting in the furthering of the produc- tion of the philosopher, the artist and the saint, "within us and without us," 21 and doubtless he would fain have seen every man a higher man, and none used for ends outside them ; n but, as things are, only a few show effectively the higher possibili- ties, and the rest come nearest to a high value by serving them. I shall recur to the subject in treating his closing period. 23 Nietzsche gathered encouragement for his hope of a new culture from the old Greek world. The contemplation of that great past made him believe that what he wished for was no empty dream. 24 He says, "The Greeks are interesting and tre- mendously important (ganz toll wichtig), because they had such a number of great individuals. How was this possible? It is this that we must study." "What alone interests me is the relation of a people to the education of the individual." And yet it must be confessed that in the fragmentary notes 25 from which these remarks are taken, Nietzsche gives us scant light 18 Ibid., sects. 1, 5. 19 "Use and Harm of History etc.," sects. 5, 9. Cf. Havelock Ellis's observations on this point, Affirmations, p. 21. 20 "The Preacher," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 21 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5 (the italics are mine). 22 Cf. the strong feeling he shows about using up individuals for scientific purposes, by narrowly specializing them ; " the furthering of a science at the expense of men is the most injurious thing in the world " (Werke, X, 413, §§ 274-5; cf. IX, 325). 23 See pp. 381-2. 24 Cf. the remarks of his sister, Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxi. 25 They were intended for use in " We Philologists." 66 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER on the subject. He does little more than point out that the " great individuals ' ' did not come from any particular friendli- ness on the part of the people, arising rather amid conflicts in which evil impulses had their part, and states a general con- viction that when man's inventive spirit gets to work, there may be other and better results than those which have hitherto come from chance. It is the training (Zuchtung) of the higher types, i.e., a conscious purpose in that direction, on which the hope of the future rests. 26 rv His derivation of special duties presents little that is unusual. "Duties" are born of ideals. Ultimately we impose them on ourselves; yet they may be strict obligations. 27 He speaks of the "pressure" of the chain of duties which the Schopenhauer type of man fastens on himself. 28 "Favored" is synonymous to him with "fearfully obligated." Freedom is a privilege, an obligation, a heavy one, "and it can only be paid off by great deeds"; those who fail to realize this, do nothing good with their freedom and easily go to pieces. 29 He even speaks of those who enter the lists for a culture such as has been described, as coming to "the feeling of a duty to live" 30 — a different thing, I need not say, from the animal craving to live. "Justice," "sympathy," "pity," "love" sometimes receive shades of meaning which are determined by his particular views, but substantially they mean the same to him as to the rest of us. He is not laudatory of power, and asks his genera- tion, "Where are those among you who will follow the divine example of Wotan and become greater the more they withdraw — who will renounce power, knowing and feeling that it is evil?" 31 He speaks of Wagner as early tempted to seek for "power and glory," but notes that he had risen to purer air. 32 The man inspired by justice he deems the most reverend speci- men of our kind, and he finds it an impulse for the scholar as " See WerJce, X, 384-5, §§ 199, 200. 27 " Schopenhauer etc.," sects. 5, 6, 8. 28 Ibid., sect. 5. 28 Ibid., sect. 8. 80 Ibid., sect. 6. 81 "Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 11. 82 Ibid., sect. 8. ETHICAL VIEWS 67 truly as for others; a spark from this fire falling into the scholar's soul purifies and ennobles him — lifts him out of the lukewarm or frigid mood in which he is apt to do his daily task. 33 Nietzsche interprets justice (momentarily at least) after Schopenhauer, as a metaphysical impulse 34 — that is, one that breaks down the wall of individuality belonging to our phenomenal being and makes each say "I am thou." Egoism, in the ordinary sense of the term, receives little countenance from him; whether unintelligent or intelligent, whether on the part of the people or of the possessing classes, it wins no admiration. 35 Sympathy and pity rank with justice. I may cite here an incident in his personal history. His attack on Strauss has been already mentioned. It sounds malicious at times, cer- tainly it was often ironical, but it was really an attack on the specious German culture which Strauss represented (particu- larly in the widely read Old and New Faith™), not on Strauss himself; and when the learned man died, Nietzsche was half- rueful (for his book had made considerable impression), and wrote a friend, ' ' I hope that I did not make his last years harder to bear, and that he died without knowing anything of me. It disturbs me a bit." 37 His sister tells us that so long as a type he combated was impersonal, he could fight joyfully; but when he was suddenly made to realize that a man of sensitive heart, surrounded by revering friends, stood behind it, pity arose instead, and he suffered more from the blows of his sword than the enemy did — and that then he would sigh, "I am not really made for hating and enmity. ' ' M b He had also sympathy for the "people," the unfortunate. In discussing the reform of the theater, he appears to have above all the popular aspects of the case in mind, speaking of the hollowness and thought- lessness of a society, which only concerns itself for the mass so 83 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 34 Ibid., sect. 6. 35 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sects. 5, 9; cf. the tone in which " truth as an egoistic possession of the individual " is spoken of, sect. 6. 36 Welcker judged Strauss with similar sharpness (according to R. M. Meyer, Jahrbuch fur das classische Alterthum, V (1900), 716. 37 See Werke (pocket ed.), II, xxxviii. There is a later reference in somewhat different tone, Werke (8vo ed.), XIV, 373-4, §250. 38 Werke (pocket ed.), II, xl. 68 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER far as they are useful or dangerous, and goes to the theater and concerts without ever a thought of duties. 39 He even says, "One cannot be happy, so long as everything suffers and creates suffering about us ; one cannot be moral, so long as the course of human things is determined by violence, deceit, and injustice ; one cannot even be wise, so long as all mankind has not striven for wisdom and does not lead the individual in the wisest way to life and knowledge " 40 — it is almost a socialistic sentiment. He tells us how Wagner "out of pity for the people" became a revolutionist 41 (something many of us may not know, unless perchance we have read Mr. Shaw's The Per- fect Wagnerite) , and gives an admiring description of Wagner's art, which no longer uses the language of a caste, knows no distinction between the educated and the uneducated, and is contrasted to this extent with the culture of the Renaissance, including that of Leopardi and of Goethe, its last great fol- lowers. 42 Indeed under Wagner's spell, he hails a future in which there will be no highest goods and enjoyments which are not common to all. 43 He desires an art — a true art, a true music — which shall be just for those who least deserve it, but most need it. 44 We have already noted his glowing picture of the effect of the ancient Dionysian festivals and dramas in uniting different classes, breaking down the barriers between free men and slaves, making men feel, indeed, their oneness with all that lives — no one without deep human sympathies could have written in this way; and it was a new Dionysiac art, a new Dionysiac age, for which he at this time thought that Wagner was helping to prepare the way. Sympathy and pity are only forms which love takes in given situations, and love as a principle, as the culmination of justice, and reaching its perfect expression in the saint, is the supreme thing to Nietzsche. The distinctive noble marks of youth are "fire, defiance, self-forgetfulness, and love." 45 Light-bearers seek out men, reluctant to lend their ears, "com- 89 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 40 Ibid., sect. 5. 41 Ibid., sect. 8; cf. Ecce Homo, II, 5. 42 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 10. 48 Ibid., sect. 10. 44 Ibid., sect. 6. 46 " Use and Harm of History etc.," sect. 9. ETHICAL VIEWS 69 pelled by love." 46 "The Ring of the Nibelungen" is "the most moral music" that he knows — he refers above all to the transfiguration of love there portrayed, clouds, storms, and even the sublime in nature being beneath it. 47 He compares Wagner (whose cause he is pleading in the uncertain days before Bayreuth) to Sieglinde who lives "for love's sake." 48 It is love which purifies us after despair, love by which we make the eternal suffering of the world our own, love in which the artist and we all create, or do anything that is truly great; through love alone we learn not only to see truly and scorn ourselves, but to look out beyond ourselves and seek with all our power for a higher self which is still somewhere hidden. 49 Morality reaches its culmination in the saint. Nietzsche praises Schopenhauer for making the saint the final judge of existence. 50 The thought is the same when he describes in turn the Rousseau ideal of man, the Goethe ideal, and the Schopen- hauer ideal, and calls the last superior. The Schopenhauer type negates whatever can be negated to the end of reaching the truly real. He may in the process put an end to his earthly happiness, may have to be hostile even to men he loves and to institutions that gave him birth, he dare spare neither men nor things, although he suffers from the injury he inflicts; he may be misunderstood and long pass as an ally of powers he despises, may have to be counted unjust, though all his striving is for justice — but he will say to himself, and find consolation in saying (they are Schopenhauer's words), "A happy life is impossible ; the highest thing which man can reach, is an heroic course of life. Such he leads who, in any manner and situation, fights against enormous odds for what is in some way of uni- versal benefit and in the end conquers, though he is ill or not at all rewarded. ' ' 51 This may not be the ordinary idea of the saint, but it is what Nietzsche means when he uses the term: it is really the hero-saint whom he has in mind. Such an one 48 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 47 Ibid., sect. 2. 49 Ibid., sect. 10. 49 Ibid., sect. 8, Birth of Tragedy, sect. 18, " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 60 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7. 61 Ibid., sect. 4. Cf. Schopenhauer's Parerga und Parelipomena, II, § 172; Aphorismen fur Lebensweisheit, § 53. 70 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER dies to self, he scarcely lives any longer as a separate person, his suffering is but part of the universal suffering — Nietzsche remarks that there are moments in our experience when we hardly understand the word ' * I. ' ' 52 It is a part of the higher purpose of tragedy to awaken this sense of a superpersonal being. It is a sense which the contemplation of death and change (things inwrought with individual existence) does not disturb; and Nietzsche is bold enough to imagine that as an individual touched by the tragic spirit unlearns the fearful anxiety about death and change which besets most of us, so the ideal height for mankind, when it comes to die, as die it must, will be to have so grown together into unity that it can as a whole face its dissolution with equal elevation and com- posure. 53 It is a thought hard to grasp. I have said that to Nietzsche the ideal was born from within, a free projection of the soul. So vital is this element of freedom to him that he at one time makes a remark which may offend us. It is in connection with an interpretation of Wagner and is really a statement of Wagner's view, but from the way he makes it, we may be sure that it represents his own. After saying that it is no final arrangements for the future, no Utopia, which Wagner contemplates, that even the superhuman good- ness and justice which are to operate there will be after no unchangeable pattern, and that possibly the future race will in some ways seem more evil than the present one, he adds (in substance) : for whatever else the life may be, it will be open and free, passion will be counted better than stoicism [stoic apathy] and hypocrisy, honor even in evil courses better than losing oneself in the morality of tradition — for, though the free man may be good as well as evil, the unfree man is a dishonor to nature and without part either in heavenly or in earthly consolation, and whoever will be free must make himself so, freedom falling into no man's lap as a gift. 54 He may also offend us in what he says of Siegfried, for he speaks admiringly of the Selbstigkeit of this hero. Now Siegfried is, as Mr. Shaw has pointed out, something of a revolutionist; he disre- 52 "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 5. 08 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. "Ibid., sect. 11. ETHICAL VIEWS 71 gards traditional laws and the ancient Gods — he is for man, for the living. In all this he is free, fearless, follows his im- pulse absolutely — and Nietzsche calls it his "Selbstigkeit," "unschuldige Selbstigkeit." 55 The word is an unusual one and English writers ordinarily render it "selfishness" — so that Nietzsche appears to sanction selfishness and pronounce it innocent from the start. The Germans have, however, a special word for selfishness, which it is noticeable that Nietzsche does not use, Selbstsucht, and the connection plainly shows that it is simply an unconditional following of inner impulse against outward pressure, a strong selfhood, which he has in mind: we might say ' ' self -will, ' ' if we could rid that word of associations of petty arbitrariness and obstinacy. An analogue to Siegfried may be found in Prometheus, to whom Nietzsche elsewhere refers — and with something of the same thought. The glory of Prometheus in his eyes is that he is ready to save the needy race of man even though he goes against the laws and pre- rogatives of the Gods, i.e., by sin — the Aryan myth thus pre- senting an interesting contrast to the corresponding Semitic one, according to which mere feminine curiosity and weakness brought down Heaven's wrath. 56 But the strong selfhood, which is an indispensable part of Nietzsche's conception of virtue, involves hardness on occasion — one must not be too sensitive to pain, whether one's own or others'. /The thinker must be ready to be hardy A part of Nietzsche's admiration for Schopenhauer lay in the fact that he was a good and brave fighter ; he had had by inheritance and also from his father's example that first essential of the philoso- pher, firm and rugged masculinity (unbeugsame und rauhe Mdnnlichkeit) 5 Nietzsche also appreciates unconventionality — and this too because a strong selfhood is thereby indicated. Our artists, he says, and notably Wagner, live more bravely and honorably than our scholars and professors — even Kant con- formed too much. 58 / 55 Ibid., sect. 11. 66 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 9. 67 " Schopenhauer etc.," sects. 2, 3, 7. "Ibid., sects. 3, 7, 8. CHAPTER VII SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS Nietzsche's moral aim became practically, as we have seen, a striving for a new culture) Some consequences in the social and political field are now to be noted. One is the sanction he feels obliged to give to slavery. Wherever there has been anything like culture or civilization in the world, something like slavery has been at its basis. It is so now. The current phrase ' 'factory slave" is not a mere metaphor. When an individual works for others' good rather than his own, and has to, whether the compelling force is that of a personal master or of circumstances over which he has no control, slavery exists in principle. 1 It is not a thing in which, as one might imagine from current representations of Nietzsche, he takes pleasure, but rather one of those forbidding facts which give a problematical character to existence in general. The only apology for slavery is that the possibility of attaining the higher ends of human existence is bound up with it. Culture — meaning now broadly any social state in which man rises above his natural life as an animal and pursues ends like philosophy and art — does not come at will, but is strictly conditioned. As before stated, it is the fruit of leisure ; and that there may be leisure for some, others must work more than their share. a Such a necessity goes against our instincts of humanity and justice, and many have been led to rebel against it. We read of Emerson making a modest attempt in this direction. It was in the days of the Anti-Slavery agitation and he had been urging, with a somewhat larger view than the abolitionists ordi- narily took, ' ' Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the (Nietzsche's broad use of the term "slave" becomes even more con- spicuous later, see pp. 127, 249-50, 442-3. 72 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 73 abolition meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own work frees a slave.' ' And now, as if at least to set his own life right, he goes to work digging in his Concord garden — if not all day, a part of it. He continues for a time, but he finds alasl that his writing and power of intellectual work are suffering, that, as he quaintly puts it, if his ' ' terrestrial corn, beets, onions, and tomatoes flourish, the celestial archetypes do not" — and so comes at last to the reluctant conclusion, " The writer shall not dig." b The logic of the experience is old. Of course, when he ceased doing "his own work," some one else had to work the more (supposing that his writing and thinking were to continue), and "slavery" went on much as before. Nietzsche puts it broadly, "Slavery belongs to the nature of a culture" (zum Wesen einer Cultur gehort das Sklaventhum) . "That there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for a development of art, the immense majority must be in service to a minority"; at the former's expense, by their surplus labor (Nietzsche does not shun the Marxian word, Mehrarbeit)ifa privileged few are lifted above the struggle for existence. 2 It is a hard view, but the truth, he thinks, is hard at times, 3 and it seems a virtue to him not to deceive oneself. We in our day speak of the "dignity of man," the "dignity of labor," the "equal rights" of all — to him these are phantom conceptions by which we hide the real state of the case from our eyes, above all by which the great slave mass among us hide their real estate from their eyes. 4 y ii But Nietzsche must not be misunderstood. In recognizing the slavery of the manual workers, he does not mean to place them in contrast with the employing and commercial classes who have rights to do as they please. One of the best and most intelligent of our American newspapers speaks of him as "par excellence the philosopher of the unscrupulous business man. ' ' 5 This is the half -knowledge, or rather, to speak frankly, 2 WerJce, IX, 151. Nietzsche is here stating the presuppositions of Greek culture, but the truth is to his mind general. 8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4. 4 Werke, IX, 148-9. 6 Springfield Weekly Republican, 14 Nov., 1907. 74 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER the ignorance of our cultivated circles with respect to Nietzsche today. In a normal social organization, the employing and commercial classes would in his view be subject to control as well as the workers. The unhappy thing in the modern world is that they have more or less emancipated themselves from control. This is the meaning of laisser faire — a doctrine of liberty in the interests of the employing and commercial classes. Nietzsche finds it working injuriously on the morality of modern peoples. 6 The unrestrained egoism of individuals as of peoples is pushing them into mutually destructive struggles, and it is the most covetous who have the supreme place. 7 Once a re- straining influence was exercised by the Church, but the Reformation was obliged, in order to get a foothold, to declare many things adiaphora (i.e., not subject to the control of religious considerations), and economical activity was one of them, with the result that "the coarsest and most evil forces " have come to be the practically determining things almost everywhere. 8 Educated classes and states alike are carried away by pecuniary ambitions, at once grandiose and contempti- ble. He speaks repeatedly of "the selfishness of the business class/' "the brutal money-greed of the entrepreneurs."* It is "a period of atoms, of atomistic chaos/ ' into which we have passed. 10 Particularly after the Franco-Prussian war did Nietzsche notice the unchaining of this vulgar egoism in Germany. Rapacious striving, insatiable accumulating, selfish and shame- less enjoying were characteristic marks of the time. 11 "When the war was over, the luxury, the contempt of the French, the nationalism (das Nationale) displeased me. How far back had we gone compared with Goethe! Disgusting sensualism! ' ,12 The new spirit perverted the aims of culture. Now forsooth education was to be for practical purposes ; the kind that looked beyond money and gain, that consumed much time and sep- arated one from society, was questioned — or stigmatized as 6 ' ' Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 2. 7 Birth of Tragedy, sect. 15, " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 8 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect 4. 8 Ibid., sect. 6, " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 10 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 4. 11 Ibid., sect. 6. 12 Werke x XI, 119, § 369. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 75 "refined egoism," " Epicureanism. ' ' People said, "We have been too poor and modest hitherto, let us become rich and self- conscious, and then we also [i.e., as well as the French] shall have a culture!" — to which Nietzsche could only reply that this kind of a culture would be the opposite of what he believed in. 13 Art was misconceived, though this tendency he admitted to be general in modern society: "modern art is luxury," the appanage of the wealthy class, their relief from fatigue or ennui. He comments on the unscrupulousness of those who take art and artists into their pay; for just as they "by the shrewdest and most hard-hearted use of their power have known how to make the weaker, the people, even more sub- servient, lower, less like the people of old (unvolksthumlicher) , and to create the modern type of "worker," so they have laid hands on the greatest and purest things which the people have created out of their deepest need and in which they have ten- derly expressed their soul in true and unique artist fashion, namely, their myths, their songs, their dances, their idioms of speech, in order to distil out of it all a sensuous remedy for the exhaustion and tedium of their existence." 14 Indeed few socialists, and, I might add, few old-time aristocrats, could speak more disrespectfully than he of the industrial and com- mercial powers that now rule the world — the money powers included, who use the state itself for selfish purposes, and on occasion oppose war and even favor the masses against mon- archs, since the masses incline to peace, and peace is better for them to ply their trade in ! 15 | This does not mean that he fails to recognize the legitimate place of industry and trade and finance in the world, however large the scale on which they may be conducted ; he has no notion of returning to an archaic simplicity of life after the manner of Tolstoy. "Every society must have its bowels," he remarks in homely fashion; 16 and he would doubtless have agreed that the larger the society, the wider its range of need, the ampler the bowels might well be. The inversion of the true order of things which he finds today 18 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 6. 14 "Richard Wagner etc./' sect. 8. 15 Werke, IX, 160-2. As against this kind of supremacy, Nietzsche is willing to have war. 19 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 6. 76 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER is simply that the bowels have become the end for which the body exists. Servants in control, instead of being controlled — this is the gist of the situation, the business as truly as the working classes coming normally under the serving or slave category. Freemen are a different class altogether — they are the higher types already described, whose manner of life the slaves make possible, those for whom the ordered life of society ultimately exists and from whom it normally receives its final direction. in In the light of the foregoing, the personal " non-political' ' attitude of Nietzsche is not so strange. It has little to do with theoretic anarchism. He recognizes the place and function of the state. While originating in force, violence, usurpation, and so of shameful birth, the result of it in time is an ordered social life on a large scale (for families or tribes or village communi- ties are hardly as yet states), and the possibility of a class set free from labor, who can devote themselves to the higher ends of life. This is its justification — the justification even of the conquest and wrong that lie at its basis. "Proudly and calmly the Greek state advances before the judgment seat, and leads by the hand a blooming and glorious figure, Greek society. For this Helen it makes its wars — what gray-bearded judge will dare pass an adverse verdict ? " 17 Hence if Nietzsche does not take part in the political life of his time and even intentionally holds aloof from it, it was not for anarchistic reasons. In the first place it should be borne in mind that for all his criticism he was essentially loyal to his fatherland — even to Prussia. He admitted that one who is possessed by the furor philo- sophicus has no time for the furor politicus, but he added that if one's country is in actual need, one will not hesitate for a moment to take one's post; 18 and he had himself, as we have seen, taken service under Prussia, so far as he could, in the war of 1870. Secondly, he held that the political art is essen- tially a special art, i.e., one not for everybody, but for those who are specially trained. All are properly subject to the state, but not all should have a hand in steering it. He thought 17 Werke, IX, 159. 18 " Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 7. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 77 \ that states are poorly arranged, in which other than statesmen have to interfere in public business, and that they merit their fate if they go to pieces from "these many statesmen.'' 19 And, thirdly, he felt that politics is actually in a bad way at the present time — commercial aims are ruling it and socialism is threatening; wealth, comfort, "freedom" are the main things aimed at — it is a practically uncontrollable tendency that must have its day. He saw the new tendency, as just explained, taking possession of Germany. Hence he was not at home in the world about him. The Socrates of Plato compared the wise man under the political conditions of the then-existing world to one who takes shelter behind a wall, when the wind is making a hurricane of dust and rain. 20 Something like this was Nietz- sche's attitude to the politics of his day. He felt that a valid order did not exist — that a kind of madness was taking pos- session of men's minds. Or, if I am not again connecting him with too great a name, he was like Plato himself when the latter turned the energy of his thought and imagination to the con- struction of an ideal res publica — and indeed Nietzsche's con- ception in detail was not unlike Plato's, save as he gave (par- ticularly at this time) a vital place to the artist, a class whom Plato wished to banish. Nietzsche himself notes that the fire and exaltation of Plato's political passion went in this ideal (rather than practical) direction. 21 He comments on Niebuhr's reproach against Plato that he was a poor citizen, and says, Let one who feels in this way be a good citizen, and let Plato be what he was. 22 In other words, political activity has a quite secondary place in his estimation — though this does not mean that he gave it no place. A state-favored philosophy he counted especially undesirable, states being what they are. The state wants only what is useful to itself. Better let philosophers grow wild or even be persecuted, he once ventures to say, and then perhaps the real ones will be sifted out. 23 A happy con- trast, in his judgment, of the Greek state with the prevailing type of state today is, that it did not assume to be a regulator or overseer of culture, but simply a good muscular helper, a hardy escort for it among rough realities. 24 19 Ibid., sect. 7. 22 " Schopenhauer etc.,'' sect. 8. 20 The Republic, vi, 496. 28 Ibid., sect. 8. 21 Werke, IX, 164. 24 Werke, IX, 369, 370. CHAPTER VIII RELATIONS WITH WAGNER The intellectual preparation for the new culture which Nietz- sche hoped for had been made, he thought, by Kant and Scho- penhauer — the former in demonstrating the limits of scientific knowledge, the latter in facing fearlessly the tragic facts of existence and in proposing the production of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, as the true aim of human life. But the practical attaining of the result was another matter — and art, he believed, might render great assistance to this end. Yes, a certain kind of art would stand almost in a relation of cause and effect to it — namely, art of the Dionysiac type such as had existed among the Greeks. Nietzsche thought he discovered the beginnings of such an art in the work of a contemporary — Richard Wagner. Wagner was, in a sense, a disciple of Scho- penhauer; he possessed an ardent moral nature and was dis- satisfied with the existing forms of social and political life; he too looked, however vaguely, for a new culture, and was not without the thought that art — and his art in particular — might serve to this end. It is necessary to explain at the outset Nietzsche's view of the peculiar nature of musical art — something I passed over in treating his view of art in general. In it he follows closely in the footsteps of Schopenhauer. Music is radically different from the other arts. A picture, a statue, or a poem of the epic order portrays things without us, or as we might imagine their existing without us — it gives us objects. Music, on the other hand, expresses feeling and has nothing to do directly with objects. It reflects moods, desires, longings, resolves — the whole spontaneous and voluntary side of our nature, which Schopen- hauer summed up as will. No doubt most of us are conscious 78 RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 79 at times of a peculiar intimacy in music — it touches us, takes hold of us, seems to reveal hidden depths within us, as nothing else does. Schopenhauer called it the most metaphysical of the arts, meaning that it comes nearest to expressing the inmost reality of things, which to his mind was will. The other arts are at two removes from this reality; not only is it objects which they give us, but these objects are themselves repre- sentative of objects. Music, on the contrary, stands directly related to it — when we listen to music, only this lightest, most insubstantial, most transparent of all objects, sound, stands between us and the reality. Now there are feelings of the moment, and there is what we may call the ground-tone of our life — our feeling about life, our attitude to it, whether of affirmation or negation, in short, the set of our will as a whole. It is music of the deeper, more significant sort that interested Nietzsche, and it was this kind of music which he thought lay at the basis of the Greek tragic drama. It was of religious inspiration, reflected general moods about life, was a part of the worship of Dionysus./' The full title of Nietzsche's book on Greek Tragedy was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. In it he points out that the earliest form of tragedy was simply song and gesture (dance), that the dialogue came later and was a secondary matter. Even down to Sophocles the chorus was the central thing. Hence in that revival of a tragic culture, toward which Nietzsche's thoughts were turning, it was natural that music should have a central place, — it was natural too to think that music would render vital service in preparing the way for that culture, by stirring the feelings, the mood, on which it would ultimately rest.* ) ii The capital point in this theory is that the musical strains are expressive of feeling directly, neither copying external objects nor produced for objective effect — the purity of music lies in its lyric quality. Just in proportion to its genuineness would, Nietzsche held, the new music avail. 1 The Dionysian maenads had no thought whether others were observing them 1 Cf. Birth of Tragedy, sects. 19, 22, 24. 80 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER or not — they sang and danced from inner impulse; Raphael's Cecilia, we feel, is not singing to others, but to herself and heaven. 2 True music is a kind of soliloquy, and Wagner reaches this, Nietzsche feels, in his great works, " Tristan and Isolde," the " Meistersinger, ' ' and the "Ring." 3 Wagner too has the right view of the relation of words to music (i.e., Nietzsche thinks so at the start) : the music, through which the ground- emotion of the persons in the drama is communicated to the hearer, is for him the primary thing; then comes the action or gestures of the persons, and last of all the words, as a still paler reflection of the original emotional state. 4 The music is not an accompaniment to the words (as is the case in ordinary opera — something which Nietzsche detests), rather are the words a kind of halting accompaniment to the music. b Yes, in such words as Wagner knows how to use, he gets back, Nietzsche feels, to the primitive significance of language — which was itself half poetry and feeling; the words are often tones more than anything else — and to Wagner's sympathetic imagination, all nature, alive and striving, seeks to express itself in tones. In this connection Nietzsche refers to Schiller's confession that in poetical composition his mind had no definite and clear object before it at the start, the first impulse being a certain musical mood, and that the poetical idea came afterwards and as a consequence. 5 Nietzsche interprets the folk-song in a similar way — the air or melody is primary, and the accom- panying poetry is born out of it, and may even be of different sorts: the music is the standard, with which the words strive to harmonize. 6 He goes so far as to say of music in general, that it tolerates the image, word, or concept rather than needs it, language never touching its inner depths. 70 Feeling is equally, he holds, the original element in myths such as Wagner uses or fashions — in them he poetizes. In the "Ring," for instance, we have a series of myths, which Wagner partly adopted, partly created, as an objectivation of his feeling about the world and society — they are utterly unintelligible as scien- tific statements, and can only be comprehended as we pass into 1 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 9. B Birth of Tragedy, sect. 5. 8 IUd., sect. 8. ° Ibid., sect. 6. 4 Ibid., sect. 5. 7 Ibid., sect. 6. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 81 the mood out of which they were projected; a corresponding scientific statement might be made, but it would be totally different. 8 in With these deeper views of music, with his poetic, myth- making gift (a far greater, more helpful thing to the mass of mankind than the analytic scientific faculty), with his broad human sympathies and his sense of the tragic nature of the world, Wagner was the man, Nietzsche thought, to prepare the general mind emotionally, as Kant and Schopenhauer had intel- lectually, for the culture to be; if Schopenhauer was par emi- nence its philosopher, Wagner was to be its artist. Broad im- personal ties of this kind lay at the basis of the enthusiastic attachment which he formed for Wagner — the great musician met a profound need of the time, filled out his ideal. But per- sonal relations were also formed — and the friendship between the two men, while it lasted, was something rare and beautiful. As before stated, he often spent week-ends with Wagner in his villa at the foot of Mt. Pilatus, overlooking Lake Lucerne — with Wagner and his wife Cosima, for whom he had an almost equally reverent affection. At this time the master was working on ' ' Siegfried, ' ' and plans were also making for the event which loomed so large in their common expectations — Bayreuth. Nietzsche afterwards said that he was perhaps the first to love Wagner and Schopenhauer with a single enthusiasm 9 — and in writing to a friend at the time he described these days (between 1869-72) as his " practical course in the Schopenhauerian philosophy. ' ' 10 He felt that he was in the presence of a genius such as Schopenhauer had portrayed. "No one knows him, ,, he writes, "or can judge of him, because all the world stands on a different basis and is not at home in his atmosphere. There is such an absolute ideality about him, such a deep and affecting humanity, such sublime seriousness that I feel in his presence as if I were near something divine. ' ' n Again, ' 1 1 8 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 9. 9 Werke, XIV, 375, § 254. 10 Brief e, II, 150. See the description of this intercourse, and the admirable account of the whole Metzsche-Wagner episode by Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche u.s.w., pp. 37-56. 11 Brief e, I, 142-3. 82 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER have my Italy as well as you. . . . It is called Tribschen [the name of Wagner's villa] : and I am already at home in it. Dearest friend, what I there learn and see, hear and under- stand, is indescribable. Believe me, Schopenhauer and Goethe, ^schylus and Pindar still live. ' ' 12 The happiness of these years was never forgotten by Nietzsche; after he broke with Wagner, and when he was criticising and dissecting him in perhaps unmerciful fashion, the memory of them haunted him. "How often/' he writes to Peter Gast in 1880, "I dream of him and ever in the manner of our old confidential relations. Never was an evil word spoken between us, not even in my dreams, but very many cheering and glad ones, and with no one per- haps have I so often laughed. It is past now — and what matters it that in many points I am in the right against him! As if that lost sympathy could be wiped out of my memory ! " 13 And, though Nietzsche was the reverential admirer and disciple, he gave as well as received. The music in the third act of "Sieg- fried" is said to be partly owing to his influence — his sister telling us that Wagner often assured her that his coming to know Nietzsche had inspired him to this music, for he [Nietz- sche] had given him back his faith in the German youth and in the future. 14 Moreover, Wagner took over from him the conceptions of "Dionysiac" and "Apollinic" as principles of art* His appreciation of Nietzsche was strong and warm. "After my wife," he wrote him at this time, "you are the one prize which life has brought me"; and again, "Before God I declare that I believe you to be the one person who knows what I want to do." 15 The relationship with Wagner and the issues involved were so great in Nietzsche's eyes, d that he more or less reshaped his scholar's life accordingly. He had been lecturing on Greek life and philosophy, and was preparing an extensive work on the subject, 6 and now he took some of the material and made a little book of it by itself, which he dedicated to Wagner. His ultimate aim in the book was to show that, as the tragic view and tragic art had marked the great epoch of the Greeks, a similar view 12 Ibid., II, 167. 18 Ibid., IV, 356; cf. Ecce Homo, II, §§5, 6. 14 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, ix. 18 Brief e. Ha. 85. 131. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 83 and art were needed for another great culture today, and that Wagner was pointing the way. It was The Birth of Tragedy. It offended purely philological circles, but it served its purpose none the less ; f and the light it threw on old Greek life is per- haps more important than was commonly thought at the time. g Wagner circles, and above all Wagner himself, were profoundly stirred. He went freshly to work on the last act of " Gotter- dammerung," and said he knew not how he could have been so fortunate. Nietzsche was even ready to go about Germany giving lectures in behalf of the Bayreuth idea, and composed an "Appeal to the German nation/' h In May, 1872, he was one of the reverent company that attended the laying of the corner-stone of the Bayreuth theater, and listened to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony rendered under the master's direction. "There was something in the air," he said in com- menting on the occasion, "that I have nowhere else experienced, something quite indescribable and of richest promise. ' ' 16 About this time Wagner left Tribschen for his permanent home in Bayreuth, and Nietzsche did not see him so frequently thereafter. The idyllic period in their mutual relations proved to be over. The physical separation may have given Nietzsche an opportunity for critical reflection such as he had hardly had before; in any case, questionings, doubts began to arise, and somewhat clouded his simple faith. Yet his main feeling con- tinued to be that of loyalty, and he not only wrote pamphlets or little books to serve the general cause of a new culture (the first three Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen), but a special one on Wagner ("Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"). This last was at once an elaborate critical study and a splendid tribute. In it Bayreuth appears as a "morning consecration for the day of battle ' ' 17 — the book published on the eve of the opening in 1876. It was really an appeal and a challenge to the German- speaking peoples on Wagner's and Bayreuth 's behalf. 1 Wagner, quite overcome, wrote to him, "Friend, your book is immense. . . . Where did you get the knowledge of me?" and he urged 16 Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches by Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, Vol. II, p. 77. That same summer he also witnessed a wonderful performance of "Tristan and Isolde" in Munich (along with his friends, Freiherr von Gersdorff and Fraulein von Meysenbug). 17 " Richard Wagner etc.," sect. 4. 84, NIETZSCHE THE THINKER him to come to the rehearsals soon to be given. Nietzsche came, at least to the opening performances — and with what effect I must now proceed to relate. IV To understand what happened, it is necessary to bear in mind all Nietzsche's idealism about Bayreuth. As the special scene of the master's activity, and as the center of redeeming influences that were to go out to the German people, it was almost holy in his eyes. In the book just referred to, he pictured gathered there the more serious, nobler spirits of his generation — men and women who had their home elsewhere than in the present and were to be explained and justified otherwise than by the present, or, to use another metaphor, were like a warm current in a lake which a swimmer encounters showing that a hot spring is near by. 18 You shall find — he said in sub- stance — prepared and consecrated spectators at the summit of their happiness and collecting energy for still higher achieve- ment; you shall find the most devoted sacrifice of artists, and the victorious creator of a work which is itself the result of victories all along the aesthetic line — will it not be almost like magic to witness such a phenomenon in the present time f Must not those who participate be transformed and renewed, and be ready themselves to transform and renew in other fields of lif e ? 19 Whatever misgivings lurked in his mind, he was still loyal. Yet what did he find when the Bayreuth performances began? I give the bare, brutal facts, as they are reported by his sister and other credible witnesses. The main distinction of a large number of those present seemed to be that they were able to pay the necessary nine hundred marks for the twelve performances. Some of the auditors bore great names — the German Emperor was present, and he drew a whole court in his train. Splendid toilets were observable — Marienbad in par- ticular seemed to have sent over a goodly number of its stoutish habitues (bankers and men of leisure, with their wives) : on round paunches dangled heavy gold chains, on high-swelling bosoms shone luxurious jewels, costly diamonds. In fact the 18 Ibid., sect. 1. " Ibid., sect. 4. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 85 audiences were not unlike those of a first night at the opera generally. There was, it is true, a sprinkling of notable painters and musicians; and then there were fanatical Wag- nerians, with pale faces and waving manes, who were almost ready to threaten violence, if criticism of the master or his work was made. Intrigues between artists were to be overheard (or heard of) — exclamations of wounded vanity. In general there was a kind of artificiality in the enthusiasm. The performances themselves were halting. Wagner was too preoccupied and hurried to have any real intercourse with Nietzsche, and con- tented himself with loud and extravagant praise of his book — and this jarred on Nietzsche and untuned him the more. More- over, the master appeared in an unpleasantly realistic light — the air of repose was lacking, he had become stage-manager and even journalist ; he was flattering national passions, too, showing himself anti-French and anti-Semitic. It was hard for Nietzsche to endure; and after the first performances, he went off into the Bohemian Forest, burying himself at Klingenbrunn for ten days, and noting down a few thoughts in a new vein. Then he came back to Bayreuth and tried again — but to no avail, and, before the cycle of representations had finished, he left the town never to return. It was the beginning of the end. If we let this episode stand for more than it did at the moment, for the whole break with Wagner, we may say that the causes of the break were threefold: he was disappointed with the man, with his art, and with his way of thinking. Wagner had already proved at times to be a somewhat imperious and exacting nature. At the start Nietzsche responded to whatever was asked, and was even tender of the master's peculiarities. He yielded slightly, for instance, to Wagner's anti-Semitism, though going contrary to his own instincts in doing so. 20 Once, whether for this or other reasons — in any case, to avoid giving offense to Wagner — he gave up a projected journey with a son of Mendelssohn's to Greece; 21 and at other times he joined with friends in considering how best to spare one who was so easily touched. 22 But the time came when he 20 See Arthur Drews, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 160. 21 So Richter, op. cit., p. 45. 22 Brief e, II, 207. 86 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER felt that Wagner was too insistent — suspicions, too, where there was no need to be; if he made any assertion of independence, Wagner seemed to resent it. The difficulties were smoothed over while Wagner was near at hand in Tribschen, but when he removed to Bayreuth (1872), misunderstandings sometimes lingered. Invitations involving so long a journey he could not always accept, and sometimes he was not exactly in the mood for accepting them. We find him touched, for instance, on hearing that Wagner had spoken coolly, and as if disappointed, about "The Use and Harm of History for Life," because there had been no mention of his [Wagner's] special cause in it; and once, when a friend told him that Wagner was taking it ill that he had not accepted an invitation, he replied that while he could not conceive how any one could be more loyal to Wagner than he was (if he could be, he would be), yet he must keep his freedom in minor points and abstain from too frequent personal intercourse to the very end of preserving his loyalty in the higher sense. 23 Two or three other circumstances may be mentioned. During one of his visits to Bayreuth, Nietzsche played the ' ' Triumphlied ' ' of Brahms, which he particularly liked. Wagner was not pleased, and fell into a passion at Nietzsche's praise — showed himself "not great," as Nietzsche remarked at the time to his sister. Then Wagner's stories and jokes in broad Saxon sometimes offended him — and when Wagner saw this, he seemed to ply them the more. In truth Wagner was a little of a Bohemian in manners and conversa- tion, and his occasional rudeness and coarseness wounded Nietz- sche's ideal sentiment about him. 24 Further, though, as stated, Nietzsche was slightly influenced, he could not really follow Wagner in his aversion for the Jews. Nothing perhaps shows better his natural nobility than his practically lifelong superi- ority to anti-Semitism — for though many excuses can be given for this sentiment, no noble nature can share it. But doubts were also insinuating themselves as to Wagner's art. Was there not acting in it at times, striving for effect? The ecstatic seemed often violent, was not sufficiently naive. 25 28 Ibid., I, 236. 24 Cf. Drews, op. cit., pp. 160-2; Theobald Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 65-6. 26 Werke, X, 433, § 313; cf. Joyful Science, § 368. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 87 Moreover, was Wagner really true to the theory of the relation between music and words? " Danger lest the motives for the movement of the music should lie in the movements and actions of the drama, lest the music should be led instead of leading." Were there even possible contradictions in the idea of " music drama"? 26 The relation between music and words might be organic in a song, but how about a drama ? 27 The idea hovered in Nietzsche 's mind of a symphony covering itself with a drama, as a melody does with the words of a song — there were sugges- tions of such a thing in the old Dionysian chorus ; M but Wagner, he felt, was inclining to make the music a means of illustrating the drama — and this was to forget the lyric, Dionysiac quality of music altogether, and to bring ' 'music-drama' ' down to the level of old-time opera (only linking the music a little closer to the words and situations, and dispensing with trills and arias that had no sense). In time Nietzsche came to the clear, positive conclusion that either the music must dominate, or the drama must dominate, that parallelism was out of the ques- tion ; a and now he has feelings that way, and thinks that with Wagner the organic unity is in the drama and often fails to reach the music. 30 Wagner himself once said, "The nature of the subject could not induce me, in sketching my scenes, to consider in advance their adaptability to any particular musical form, the kind of musical treatment being, in every case, sug- gested by the scenes themselves." 31 So far as this was really Wagner's practice, the conclusion is inevitable: he starts with scenes, i.e., dramatic material, and then finds musical tones appropriate to them, which is just to reverse the method and theory of music in which Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer before him, believed — and, as -Nietzsche at first supposed, Wagner also. ,' Besides all this, Nietzsche came to have doubts as to Wag- ner's general attitude and way of thinking. Was he main- taining his old heroic attitude to existing German life ? Was he not compromising, making too much of the Emperor's favor, 28 Werke, X, 436-40. 27 Ibid., X, 434, § 315. 28 Ibid., XI, 101-2, §§ 313-4. 29 Ibid., XI, 93, §276. 30 Ibid., X, 433, §310. 31 1 borrow this passage from the art., " Wagner," in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9th ed.). 88 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER making too much of Bismarck, becoming too patriotic ? 32 And did they really think alike, he and Wagner, as to the culture to be? Was Wagner aiming at a renovated humanity, or was his art rather a way of escaping from reality, an end in itself? He puts down propositions like these as if to look at, consider them : Wagner 's art is something like a flight from this world — it denies, does not transfigure the world. Directly it does not work morally, and indirectly it has a quietistic effect. Wagner only wants to get a place for his art in the world. The kind of culture that would be introduced would resemble that of a monastery — its disciples would be a sect, without part in the world around them. There would come a sort of Christianity over again — was not this art a sort of pale dying Christianity, with plenty of magical gleams and enchantments, but little clear sunlight? Can a man actually be made better by this art and by Schopenhauer's philosophy? 33 Perhaps Nietzsche was hardly aware in all this how far he was changing — moving away from the view that reality was essentially unalterable and simply to be made endurable by art. A couple of years after the Bayreuth opening, he said, ' ' Wagnerians do not wish to change anything in themselves, live in disgust with what is stale, con- ventional, brutal. Art is to lift them as by magic above it all for the time being. Weakness of will" 34 — but he has a pre- sentiment to this effect now. He is also uneasy about Wagner's rejligious tendencies. He had thought him atheist, like himself and Schopenhauer, 35 had said, " Wagner is a modern man and is not able to encourage himself by believing in God. He does not cherish the idea that he is in the hands of a good Being, but he believes in himself. ' ' 36 But now he has to own that Wagner's art is in principle the old religion over again, "ideal- ized Christianity of the Catholic sort. " 37 He had been trying to put a favorable interpretation on the reactionary elements in him — the place given to the marvelous, to mediaeval Chris- 32 Werke, X, 443; Drews, op. cit., p. 163. 83 Werke, X, 448-9, § 353. 84 Ibid., XI, 99, § 302. 80 Cf. Nietzsche's sister's reference to intimate conversations which Wagner had held with Nietzsche and his friends, Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxiv. 86 Werke, X, 441-2, § 329. 87 Ibid., X, 448, § 352. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 89 tianity, to Buddhism, as well as to princes 38 — but at last they proved too much. We today can see that "Parsifal" was a further, more pronounced expression of the same tendencies; but "Parsifal" came later. A variety of dissatisfactions and doubts were thus at work in Nietzsche 's mind, and the revulsion at Bayreuth in 1876 was only a culminating episode. 5 I have said that Nietzsche left Bayreuth never to return. This does not mean, however, that there was an open break with Wagner. The two met in Sorrento the following autumn, and their relations were outwardly much as of old. But the old warm sympathy no longer existed between them — and one inci- dent estranged Nietzsche the more. Wagner was now at work on "Parsifal," and, as if aware that the composition of a play of just this character was hardly in keeping with the views he had so often expressed, he sought to explain to Nietzsche certain religious sensations he had been having, certain inclina- tions to Christian dogmas — as, for instance, how he had been edified by the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Nietzsche could only listen in silence — it seemed to him impossible that one who had been so outspoken and so thorough in his unbelief could go back; he thought that Wagner was practising on himself. It was another disillusionment. He noted down: "L am not able to recognize any kind of greatness which does not include honesty with oneself; playing a part inspires me with disgust; if I discover anything of this order in a man, all his performances count for nothing; I know that they have every- where down at bottom this theatrical character. " 39 k Despite even this there was no open break. This came two years later still — and in connection* with a singular coincidence. Nietzsche had finished a new book, Human, All-too-Human (the first product of what we may call his second period), and was sending copies of it to Wagner and Frau Cosima in Bayreuth, along with some humorous verses of dedication. But exactly at the same time there came to him from Wagner a beautiful copy of the text of "Parsifal," with the inscription, "Cordial greetings and wishes. to his dear friend Friedrich Nietzsche," and signed "Richard Wagner, Oberkirchenrath [member of the * s IMd., X, 457-8, § 365. 30 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxiii. 90 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER high ecclesiastical consist ory]." The ecclesiastical reference was too much for Nietzsche, and it seemed almost like a chal- lenge. Eeferring to the incident ten years afterwards, he said, "This crossing of two books — it seemed as if I heard with it an ominous sound. Was it not as if swords crossed? ... At any rate we both took it so ; for we both kept silent. " 40 So far as I know, there was no direct interchange between the two men thereafter. "Wagner was undoubtedly displeased by the new manner and tone of Nietzsche's book, its almost ex- clusively critical character, and Nietzsche on his side could only say to himself, ' ' Incredible ! Wagner has become pious. ' ' /"Parsifal," now in its final form, was in truth not only Chris- tian, it was Buddhistic, 41 — it was a glorification of celibacy, and implied an aversion to the fundamental premises of life ; it was pessimist, Schopenhauerian, in the worse senses of those words. For by this time — and really, except for a brief space, always — life was a supreme end to Nietzsche, and he revolted against those who would unnerve and weaken it. He thought they exercised a corrupting influence, and he felt the odor of cor- ruption in "Parsifal." Once he exclaims, "The preaching of chastity [i.e., celibacy] is an incitement to the unnatural: I despise every one who does not feel 'Parsifal' as an attack on morality " ffi [he is thinking, of course, of those who have some understanding of "Parsifal," not of the common run of our opera-goers]. Wagner's influence, he feared, would ultimately coalesce with the stream which arises "the other side of the mountains and knows also how to flow over mountains." "Parsifal" was not, to him, a genuine German product, it was "Rome — Rome's faith without words." 431 / The whole experience shook Nietzsche profoundly. In fact it became a turning-point — perhaps the great turning-point in his life. His faith in the future, in art as a redeeming agency and preparation for the future, his faith, I had almost said, in himself, hung on Wagner. "As I went further on by 40 Ecce Homo, III, iii, § 5. 41 Drews thinks Buddhistic rather than Christian (op. cit., pp. 188-92), agreeing with Pastor Kalthoff {Nietzsche und die Kulturprobleme unseret Zeii) that the Christian element is purely decorative. 42 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," vii, §3. 43 Werke, XI, 101, § 311, "Nietzsche contra Wagner," vii, § 1. RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 91 myself," he wrote later, "I trembled; before long I was ill, more than ill, namely weary — weary from the irresistible dis- illusionment about everything that remains as inspiration to us modern men, about the everywhere wasted force, labor, hope, youth, love, weary from disgust with the whole idealistic falsi- fication and effeminacy of conscience, which had again won the victory over one of our bravest; weary finally and not least from the grief of a pitiless suspicion — that I was henceforth condemned to mistrust more deeply, to despise more deeply, to be more deeply alone, than ever before. For I had had no one but Richard Wagner." 44 He confessed to a friend, "I have experienced so much in relation to this man and his art: it was a whole long passion — I find no other word for it. The renunciation required, the finding myself again which at last became necessary, belongs to the hardest and most melancholy things that fate has brought me." 15 His mistake had been, he bitterly said, that he came to Bayreuth with an ideal. 46 He had painted an "ideal monstrosity"; "I have had the fate of idealists, whose object is spoiled for them by the very fact that they have made so much of it. " ' 47 Yes, Nietzsche was ill — ill spiritually and ill physically; indeed he had more or less suffered physically ever since his period of service in the Franco-Prussian war, as noted in the opening chapter. In the summer of 1875 he had been obliged to go to a cure in the Black Forest — and now (1876) he has to ask for a year's leave from the University. 111 This is granted him with marked signs of favor from the authorities, and he goes to Italy. 48 44 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," viii, § 1. 45 Lou Andreas-Salome"* Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, pp. 84-5. 46 Werke, XI, 122, § 385. 47 Ibid., XI, 121, § 380. 48 See the language of the "Protokoll," as cited in Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xvii. SECOND PERIOD CHAPTER IX GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD Nietzsche (now at the age of thirty-two) was not only ill, but self-distrustful — he scarcely knew whether he had a task any more or the right to one. 1 And as a physician on occasion sends his patients into new surroundings, so he, physician and patient r4n one, now sends himself to a new climate, in both the spiritual and physical senses of that word. 2 He had been living, he felt, in an atmosphere overcharged with idealism and emotion ; a cold water-cure was necessary. 3 He found himself with an uncom- mon desire to see men and their motives as they actually were. 4 He also wanted to see himself more objectively — was ready to take sides against himself, if need be, and to be hard with himself; he had had his fill of illusions. Even the emotional attitude to objects in nature went against him. 5 He understood the mental evolution of Sophocles — the aversion he in time acquired to pomp and show. 6 In other words, the craving for knowledge, for a cool, clear view of things, became uppermost in him ; ideals, ideal aims, great expectations took a subordinate place. "Unmercifully I strode over wished-for and dreamed-of things which up to that time my youth had loved, unmercifully I went on my way, the way of knowledge at any cost." 7 "I took sides against myself, and for all that gave me pain and was hard." 8 1 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. 2 Preface, § 5, to ibid. 3 Werke, XI, 123, § 391. 'Ibid., XI, 121, §381; cf. 123, §389. 5 Ibid., XI, 124, § 394. 6 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 469, § 147. 7 Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxxiv. 8 Preface, § 4, to Mixed Opinions etc. 92 GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 93 All this, however, implies that though shaken and depressed he was not disheartened. The strong will for life was still in him. He afterward realized that he had simply passed from one stage of his life to another, and that the new was as natural, and, in a way, as healthful as the old. As early as 1878 he could write: ''I feel as if I had recovered from an illness; I think with unspeakable sweet emotion of Mozart's Requiem. I relish simple foods again." 9 Again, after referring to his having taken sides against himself and his predilection, "A much greater piece of good fortune thereby came to me than that on which I willingly turned my back. ' ' 10 Later he makes the general observation: "The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. Even so with spirits hindered from changing their opinions — they cease to be spirit. ' ' u ii It is only summing this up formally to say that Nietzsche now passes into a new period — one which, though unintelligible apart from the first, is strongly contrasted with it. It lasts, roughly speaking, five or six years (from 1876 to 1881 or 1882). The literary output of it is fragmentary; at least it is made up of fragments — we have no longer connected treatises like The Birth of Tragedy, or "The Use and Harm of History for Life." Aside from the demands of his university work, he seems unable to write connectedly. He notes down his thoughts at odd moments — often when out on his walks or climbing. As the jottings accumulate, he selects from them, works them over, gives them a semblance of order, and makes a book. The three books which belong wholly to this period, and two more, which may be said to make the transition to the next, consist of aphorisms, sometimes covering three or four pages, but for the most part so brief that several of them appear on a page. They are Human, All-too-Human (1878), Mixed Opinions and Say- ings (1879), The Wanderer and his Shadow (1879), 12 the transi- 9 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 468, § 143. 10 Ibid., IV, 441-2, § 22. 11 Dawn of Day, § 573. 12 These three books appeared in later editions in two volumes with a common title, Human, All-too-Human. I cite, however, for reasons of convenience, each one separately. 94 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER tional volumes being Dawn of Day (1881), Joyful Science (1882). The first of these books follows a certain order, treat- ing successively of " First and Last Things," "The History of the Moral Sentiments," "The Religious Life," "Art and Artists," "Signs of Higher and Lower Culture," "Man in In- tercourse with Others," "Wife and Child," "The State," "Man Alone with Himself"; and the two succeeding volumes follow, though less certainly, the same order. In Dawn of Day and Joyful Science, order of any kind is but slightly perceptible. in Before taking up the new views in detail, let me note a few general marks of the period. In the first place, the spirit of change is on Nietzsche. He has known slight changes before; now it is a great change. Even his perspective of moral values is somewhat altered. He does not think, for instance, so highly of loyalty as he had. "I have not the talent for being loyal, and, what is worse, not even the vanity to wish to appear so. ' ' 13 He raises the general question whether we are irrevocably bound by vows of allegiance to a God, a prince, a party, a woman, a religious order, an artist, a thinker, — whether they were not hypothetical vows, with the unexpressed presupposi- tion that the object to which we consecrated ourselves was really what we supposed it to be. Are we obligated, he asks, to be loyal to our errors, even when we see that by this loyalty we inflict injury on our higher self? "No, there is no law, no obligation of this sort; we must become traitors, practise dis- loyalty, surrender our ideals." And if it be asked why those remaining faithful to a conviction are admired, while others who change are despised, he fears the answer must be that only motives of vulgar advantage or personal fear are supposed to inspire change — a poor tribute, he thinks, to the intellectual significance of convictions. 14 Indeed, he suspects that passion and inertia have much to do with unchangeable convictions, and that the intellect, aspiring to be cool and just, is bound to be to this extent their enemy. He puts his ideal in words like these: "From the fire [of passion] set free, we move on im- pelled by the intellect from opinion to opinion, through ia Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 443, §28. 14 Human, etc., §629. GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 95 alternation of parties, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed — and yet without a feeling of guilt." 15 Naturally he has a fresh sense of the uncertainty of things. We would not die for our opinions, he remarks, we are not sure j enough of them — though we might for the right to change them. 16a He has even the feeling of being more a wanderer than a traveler — for a traveler has a destination, and he for the time has none. 17 b He tells a parable, to which he gives the title, "The worst fate of a prophet": "For twenty years he labored to convince his contemporaries of his claims — at last he succeeded; but in the meantime his opponents had also suc- ceeded — he was no longer convinced about himself. " 18 He says (and here, too, we may be sure, he is thinking of himself) : "This thinker needs no one to refute him: he suffices to that end himself. " 19 I confess that in reading him I have some- times had the ironical reflection that he has an advantage for the student over most thinkers, in that you have only to read him far enough to find him criticising himself! — most philoso- phers leaving the most necessary task of criticising them to others. Somewhat in this line he suggests an unusual ethics of intellectual procedure. "We criticise a thinker more sharply when he advances a proposition that is displeasing to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do this, when his proposition is pleasing" 20 — so easily, he means, do our likes and dislikes take us in. This is perhaps also what he means in the paradox : "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than false- hoods" 21 — too much passion, interest, will to believe lurk in "convictions." From a like point of view, he finds practical occupation dangerous. "He who has much to do keeps his general views and standpoints almost unchanged." This is true even if a person "works in the service of an idea; he will no longer test the idea itself, he has no longer the time for doing so ; yes, it is against his interest to regard it as in general still discussable." 22 And yet, he asks, "wherein does the great- ness of a character consist, but in ability to take sides in favor 15 Ibid., §§ 636-7. 18 Ibid., § 249. 16 The Wanderer etc., § 333. 20 Human, etc., § 484. 17 Human, etc., § 638. 21 Ibid., § 483. 18 Mixed Opinions etc., §193. 22 Ibid., §511. 96 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER of truth even against himself?" 23 "Never," he charges us, "hold back something, or hide from thyself what can be urged against thy thoughts! Vow to thyself! It belongs to the first honesty of thought. Thou must every day conduct thy cam- paign against thyself. A victory and a fortress won are not merely thy affair, but truth 's — and also thy defeat is not merely thy affair ! 7 a In much the same spirit he praises the strictness and severity of science. He thinks that one who devotes himself to scientific work does not look for approval of his success, but only for censure of his failures — like the soldier. 25 He points out the less noble motives in scholarly procedure: "One person holds fast to a view, because he imagines that he has come on it himself, another because he has learned it with labor and is proud to have grasped it — both then from vanity." 26 We hear tones of irony, too. With a humiliating sense of disillusionment, he, as it were, takes it out in extravagances. He admitted in later years that in reaction from youthful en- thusiasms one easily goes too far; "one is angry on account of one 's youthful self-deception, as if it had been a sort of dishonest blindness, and by way of compensation is for a long time unrea- sonable and mistrustful toward oneself and on one's guard against all beautiful feelings. " 27 He speaks almost like a cynic at times of the part which unreason plays in human affairs, 28 and once quotes, not without malicious pleasure, a parody, which he calls the most serious he ever heard: "In the beginning was unreason, and the unreason was with God, and was God (divine) . " a Particularly does he let his irony play on idealists : they put their rainbow colors on everything ; if they are thrown out of their heaven, they make out of hell an ideal — they are incurable. 30 He is disgusted with his own previous moral arro- gance ; he wants to have a better knowledge of what he had despised — to be juster to his own time, of which he had said so many hard things. 31 For all this, he shows his identity with his former self in speaking of the power to lift things into the ideal as man's fairest power, though he adds that we should 23 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 450, § 66. 28 Human, etc., § 450. 24 Dawn of Day, § 370. 29 Mixed Opinions etc., § 22. 25 Joyful Science, § 293. 30 Ibid., § 23. 26 Human, etc., §527. 81 Werke, XII, 213, §449. 27 Werke /f XIV, 376-7, § 256. GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 97 not let it tyrannize over us, since if we do, truth will some day- leave us, declaring "thou liar from the beginning, what have I to do with thee?" 32 His strictly independent career now begins. Up to this time, he has been largely under the shadow of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Though never their slave, he now first stands quite on his own feet. c We find interesting general remarks on education, in which he puts what we receive from others in a secondary place. The young man, he notes, impatient of results, takes his picture of men and things ready-made from some philosopher or poet — he learns much thereby, but not a great deal about himself. So far as he is to be a thinker, how- ever, he must educate himself. The process of education at others' hands is either an experiment on something unknown, or else a kind of leveling to bring the new being into harmony with prevailing habits and customs; in either case it is a task that does not belong to a thinker, but to parents and teachers, whom some one with audacious honesty has called nos ennemis na- turels. It is only after one has been " educated " the longest while, that one discovers oneself — and then a thinker may well be helpful, not as a teacher, but as one who has taught himself and has experience. 33 Nietzsche even raises the question whether in this age of books teachers of the ordinary sort are not almost dispensable. 34 As few persons as possible, he ex- claims between productive minds and those hungry and ready to receive ! Let us look on the teacher as at best a necessary evil, like the tradesman — an evil to be reduced to its smallest possible proportions ! 35 Views like these, half jest, half earnest, are the reflection of his personal experience. It is not that he quite turns his back on his former teachers — after he has once found himself, he thinks there had been no harm in being among the enthusiasts and living in their equatorial zone for a while : he had in this way taken a step towards that cosmopolitanism of mind which without presumption might say, "Nothing be- longing to the mind is any longer foreign to me." 36 The very extremes of a man, he feels, may further the truth — now we 82 Mixed Opinions etc., § 345. 85 Ibid., § 282. 83 The Wanderer etc., §§ 266-7. 39 Mixed Opinions etc., § 204. 84 Ibid., § 180. 98 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER see one side of a thing and now the other, we cannot very well see both at once. 37 I have said that now Nietzsche is first independent. The independence, however, shows itself more negatively than posi- ) tively — the period is a critical rather than a constructive one. There is more analysis in it — particularly psychological analysis — than anything else. "Reflection about the human, the ail-too human, or, as the scientific phrase is, the psychological view" — such is in effect a description of its first and most characteristic book. 38 He is not so much in things and movements, as looking at them, above all at the human element in them. If he has construction in mind, it is principally in seeing what there is to construct out of — and in ruthlessly rejecting unsound ma- terial, all the vain imaginations of men. Sometimes it is called a positivistic stage — and there is a plain reaction against far flights of speculation; he wants life to rest on what is sure, demonstrable, not on the remote, indefinite, cloud-like 39 — but he is not positivist in any party sense. So it may be called a scientific stage — for at no other time does he give so high a place to science ; d still he does not become master in any par- ticular branch of scientific knowledge,* 5 and he thinks that the best and healthiest thing in science is, as in the mountains, the keen air that blows there. 40 Partly perhaps because of the new turn his mind is taking, he appreciates the English as he never had before. He even ventures to say that they are ahead of all other peoples in philosophy, natural science, history, in the field of discovery, and in the spreading of culture, 41 and he speaks with admira- tion of the distinguished scholars among them who write scien- tific books for the people ffi — men, we must suppose, of the type of Huxley and Tyndall. The French, too, come in for praise. We find frequent references to Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Chamfort. His style of composition is perhaps influenced by his study of these writers, for it has noticeably gained in simplicity and clearness, and is sometimes exquisitely polished — he owns himself that it has been often swollen and turgid before. He dedicates Human, 87 Ibid., §79. 40 Mixed Opinions etc., § 205. "Human, etc., §35. 41 Werke, XI, 136-7, §435. 19 The Wanderer etc., §§ 202-3, 310. * 2 Mixed Opinions etc., § 184. GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 99 All-too-Human to the memory of a Frenchman, the hundredth anniversary of whose death was about to occur, Voltaire, calling him "one of the greatest liberators of the mind." rv It is a period which Professor Ziegler calls his " leanest.' ' Professor Riehl, on the other hand, finds it in many respects the most attractive and valuable; and Jacob Burckhardt pro- nounced Human, All-too-Human his "sovereign book." Much depends on the point of view. If one has above all the critical temper, if one is bent on analysis and skeptical of enthusiasm, if one distrusts metaphysics and high-soaring aims, in other words if one is a typical scholar or scientific man, the writings of this period are likely to appeal to him more than any others. Nietzsche is now anti-metaphysical, anti-mystical, anti-romantic a I'outrance. His passion for actuality makes him explore all the corners of life where the ideal throws a glamor over the real and rout it out. Or, to use a sardonic metaphor which he himself employs in a later retrospect, he lays one error after another "on ice" — with the result that it is "not refuted, but freezes." It is so, he says, with "the genius," with "the saint," with "the hero"; it is so finally with "belief," with so-called "convictions"; even "pity" cools off considerably, and "the thing in itself" freezes almost everywhere. 43 Yet a deep-seeing poet has said, " We all are changed by slow degrees, All but the basis of the soul," and it is true of Nietzsche. Actuality is not the whole of possible existence, and the passion for actuality was never the whole nor the deepest -thing in Nietzsche. Later on he came to realize this distinctly. His present phase is really one of "^\yx. transition — Riehl calls it an interlude. 44 f All the same, we may as well attend to it for the time, as if no other were to follow— in fact be like Nietzsche himself, who at first does not know whether anything more is to come. He ventures a sum- mary description of how men develop intellectually during their first thirty years: — Beginning with religious impulses as children and perhaps reaching the height of their impression- * 3 Ecce Homo, III, iii, § 1. 4 * Riehl, op. cit., p. 58; cf. Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 101-2. 100 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER ability at the age of ten, tending thereafter in a more scientific direction and keeping their religion in a weaker, pantheistic form, they at last leave the ideas of God, immortality, and the like quite behind, but yield to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. In course of time, however, this too becomes in- credible. On the other hand, art appears to last, and for a while the metaphysics lingers as a form of art or as a trans- figuring artistic mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more imperative and conducts the full-grown man to natural science and history and especially into strictest methods of thinking, while to art falls an ever milder and more modest significance. 45 Nietzsche thinks that this is a kind of epitome of the intel- lectual history of humanity — it is at least, we may say, a sum- mary of his own personal history down to and into his second period. Nietzsche had a friend at this time — really since 1874 — by the name of Paul Eee. He was a positivist of the French and English type. He had written a book, Psychological Observa- tions, which impressed Nietzsche, and during the winter of 1876-77 they were together in Sorrento, where Ree wrote another book, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, a copy of which he presented to Nietzsche with the inscription, "To the father of this book from its most grateful mother. ' ' g Un- doubtedly Nietzsche influenced him, and yet he as certainly influenced Nietzsche. He seems to have particularly directed Nietzsche's attention to Pascal and Voltaire and Prosper Merimee ; he was already in that world of historical study and of fine psychological analysis which Nietzsche was to make his own, and Nietzsche once humorously dubbed his new stand- point "Reealismus." Yet a radically determining influence may be doubted. h Nietzsche's general positivistic tendency really began as far back as when his first doubts arose as to Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of the will. He speaks, indeed, of his "new philosophy," 46 but he is aware that "nature makes no leaps," and says that it is the task of the biographer to remember this principle. 47 This second period is only relatively, not absolutely distinguished from the first. 1 48 Human, etc., §272. ** Werke (pocket ed.), Ill, xxxii. 47 The Wanderer etc., § 198. CHAPTER X GENERAL OUTLOOK, AND ULTIMATE VIEW OF THE WORLD I consider first Nietzsche 's general outlook. The tragic back- ground of existence still remains for him; I forbear to quote fresh and varied statements to that effect. 1 His views of the older Greek life as somber, apart from the influence of the myths, is also continued ; only through art did man 's lot become enjoyable. 2 Nietzsche is now, however, in an unhappy state of mind about art. He has had a disillusioning experience, and art is under a shadow — to this extent, an easement and consola- tion is gone. It is not that he expressly abandons his former view, but it ceases to have relevance to the existing situation. 3 For the moment he does not know but that the days of art are j over. 4 In answer to the question, why it continues in its cus- tomary forms — music, theaters, picture-galleries, novels, poetry — he says in a matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical way that idle people find it hard to pass their time without it. He adds that if the needs of these people were not met, either they would not strive so zealously for leisure, and envy of the rich would become rarer — which itself would be a great gain — or else they would employ their leisure in thinking a little — some- thing one can learn and unlearn — thinking, for example, about the sort of lives they are leading, their social relations, their pleasures; in either case, everybody, with the exception of the artists, would be better off. 5 He has more or less satire on artists themselves, or at least criticism of them. Men of science 1 Cf ., for example, Human, etc., §§33, 71, 591; Mixed Opinions etc. y §22. 2 Cf. Human, etc., §§261, 154, 222. 3 Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., §§99, 174; Human, etc., §276; also a passage relating to Wagner quoted by Drews {op. cit., p. 163) which I cannot locate. * Cf. Human, etc., §§ 222, 223, 236. 5 Mixed Opinions etc., § 175. 101 102 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER are the nobler natures; artists are effeminate in comparison 6 — and he puts himself out of their category, saying that they "find us non-artists a little too sober." 7 Poetry and music alike receive slighting comments. Poets are not worth as much as they seem to be: they throw a veil over their ideas, and we have to pay for the veil and for our curiosity to get behind it. 8 Their thoughts often use a festive wagon of rhythm, because of inability to go afoot. 9 He doubts whether it is expedient for philosophers to quote from them, citing Homer's dictum, 1 ' Singers lie much. ' ' 10 He suggests that poetry may have had a utilitarian and even superstitious origin — rhythm, like musical melody and the dance, being among primitive peoples a way of pleasing the Gods. 11 As for music, he systematically forbade himself for a time all music of a romantic sort, thinking that it begot too many desires and longings, made the mind unclear, feminized, its "eternal feminine" drawing us — down! 12a He has even occasional sarcasm for the genius. A thinker who takes himself in this way may, by begetting distrust in the cautious and sober ways of science, be an enemy to truth 13 — Nietzsche lays stress, as he never has before, on talents and industry. 1415 If ever he speaks of "genius" admiringly, he begs us to remember that we must keep the term free of all mythological and mystical associations. 15 The danger is that surrounded by incense, the genius begins to think himself some- thing superhuman; he develops feelings of irresponsibility, of exceptional rights and superiority to criticism. 16 Nietzsche mentions Napoleon in this connection ; but the man who is principally in his mind is undoubtedly Wagner. Professor Riehl asserts that wherever the word "artist" occurs in Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche had first written "Wagner." 17 In fact he contemplated a new book on Wagner — one that would in a way expiate his former laudation (for he felt that he had led many astray) ; and now that Wagner was victorious, he could criticise him without violating his rules of literary war- 9 Ibid., §§ 205-6. 12 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. 7 Human, etc., § 236. 13 Human, etc., § 635. 8 The Wanderer etc., § 105. " Ibid., §§ 163, 165. 8 Human, etc., § 189. 15 Ibid., § 231. 10 Joyful Science, §84. ,e Ibid., §164; cf. Dawn of Day, §548. 11 Ibid., §84. 17 Op. cit., pp. 59, 60. GENERAL OUTLOOK 103 fare 18 — extended preparatory notes for the book are to be found in his published remains. 19 He did not, of course, com- pletely identify the general with the particular — he still feels the greatness of the real genius, 20 sees the place of the poet, and gives a beautiful picture of the poetry of the future (as contrasted with the unripeness and excess mistaken for force and nature now), 21 is not even without appreciation for music of the right sort ; a c but in general, art recedes into the back- ground of his thought, and the realities of the world are faced in their unrelieved somberness and bareness. We might expect that in such circumstances Nietzsche would become pessimist absolutely. But this was not the case. He still has the Dionysiac will to live against whatever odds (though saying little of Dionysus) ; he has even a certain pleasure in probing life, partly to prove what he can endure and come out victorious over, and partly for the mere sake of knowing, the joy of energizing his intellectual self. In a most interesting preface to second editions of Mixed Opinions and Sayings and The Wanderer and his Shadow written some years later, he explains his peculiar type of pessimism. It was a pessimism which does not fear the terrible and problematical in existence, but rather seeks it; it is the antithesis of the pessimism of life-weariness, as truly as of all romantic illusion ; it is a brave pessimism, a pessimism that has a good will to pessimism, 23 i.e., as I should say, it is practically not pessimism at all. We have seen Nietzsche ready at the start to justify any kind of a world— no matter how irrational and unmoral — which could be aesthetically treated and turned into a picture; and we now find him ready to justify any kind of a world that can be turned into an object of knowledge. He thinks there is easement in this attitude too. We can transcend whatever is painful in experience by an objective contemplation in which pain has no part and the pleasure of knowing alone is felt, as 18 See note b to chap, vi of this volume. 19 Werke, XI, 81-102; more fully in the pocket ed., IV, 436-70. 20 Mixed Opinions etc., §§378, 407. 21 Ibid., §§ 99, 111. He is severe against "naturalistic" poetry, saying that the poets of great cities live too near " the sewers." 22 Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc. Cf. Dawn of Day, § 461, on the possibilities of a new music, " unschuldige Musik," i.e., genuinely lyric. 23 See §§ 3-7 of the preface alluded to. 104 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER a sick man may for a moment forget his sickness in seeking to analyze and comprehend it. He speaks in so many words of psychological observation as one of the means of easing the burden of life. 24 The knowledge even of the most ugly reality is beautiful. 25 He has an appreciation of Socrates and his intellectual joy, such as he had not shown before; 26 he 'under- stands Goethe's rejoicing in the world as a man of science; 27 he notes with satisfaction that thinkers as opposed as Plato and Aristotle agreed in finding the highest happiness for men and Gods in knowing, and even adds, ' ' The happiness of the knower increases the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sun- nier; knowledge puts its beauty not only around things, but permanently into things. " 28d He himself lives on in order ever better to know; his ideal is a free, fearless hovering over men, customs, laws, and traditional valuations; and in such a life, though he has renounced much, perhaps nearly all, that would seem valuable to other men, he is happy. 29 e Knowledge is the real end of existence — with the /'great intellect" the goal of culture Is Reached. Life "an instrument and means of knowledge," life "not a duty or a fatality or a deception," but "an experiment of one seeking to know" — this is now his view of it, his justification of it. 30f He goes so far as to say, "Knowl- edge has become for us a passion, which is alarmed at no sacri- fice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction. . . . Granting even the possibility of humanity's perishing from this passion for knowledge — even this does not overcome us! . . . Are not love and death sisters? Yes, we hate barbarism — we should prefer the destruction of humanity to the recession of knowledge! And finally: if humanity does not perish of a passion, it will perish of a weakness — which should we prefer? This is the supreme question. Should we rather have it end in fire and light, or in the sand ? " 31 g 24 Human, etc., § 35. Riehl significantly remarks, " Through his dis- appointment with Wagner, Nietzsche was driven to science. He fled to it to escape from himself" {op. cit., p. 68). 26 Dawn of Day, § 550. 26 The Wanderer etc., § 86. 27 Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 445, §38. 28 Dawn of Day, § 550. 29 Human, etc., § 34. 30 Ibid., §292; Joyful Science, §324. 31 Dawn of Day, § 429. GENERAL OUTLOOK 105 ii And yet the concrete results of Nietzsche 's facing of reality, with no aid or comfort from art or metaphysical faith, are not pleasant for most of us to contemplate — were not indeed pleasant at the start for him. 32 How gladly, he says, should we exchange false ideas about a God who requires good of us, who sees whatever we do or think, who loves us and wishes our best good in all adversity, for truths that were equally salutary, quieting, and beneficent ! But they are not to be had ; philosophy at best gives us metaphysical plausibilities, and these at bottom are just as untrue. There is no way of going back to the old ideas without soiling the intellectual conscience. It is a painful sit- uation, but without pain one cannot lead and teach humanity, and woe to him who aspires to do this and has not his conscience pure ! 33 h This does not mean that Nietzsche is without appre- ciation of the services of religion in the past. He speaks of the deep indebtedness of music (Palestrina and Bach) to re- ligion, notes the impossibility of the blossoming of another art like that of the "Divine Comedy," Eaphael's paintings, Michael Angelo's frescoes, Gothic cathedrals, and does not regret that he lingered a while in the precincts of metaphysics and meta- physical art, and comes into the purely scientific camp a little later than some of his contemporaries. 34 All the same, religion and artist-metaphysics are now past for him. 1 One must have loved religion and art, he declares, as one loves mother and nurse — otherwise one cannot become wise; but one must also be able to see beyond them, to grow away from them — if one remains under their ban, one does not understand them. 35 The simple faith that all goes well for us under a loving God, so that there is no occasion to take life hard or complain, is the best and most vital remainder of the Christian movement, but with it Christianity passes into a gentle moralism — really it is the euthanasia of Christianity. 36 So confident, settled is his 82 The results are not really new, but simply now first stated in detail. 33 Human, etc., § 109. 34 Ibid., §§219, 220, 234, 273. 36 Ibid., §292; cf. § 280. 36 Dawn of Day, § 92. 106 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER conviction that he declares that if a man's attitude to Chris- tianity is not critical, we may as well turn our back on him. 37 In the absence of theistic or metaphysical faith, the world becomes aimless, essentially meaningless to him. It is a kind of welter — history is so, as well as nature. 38 He thinks that an unprejudiced investigator who searches out the development of the eye, and observes the forms it has in the lowest creatures and its gradual growth, comes to the conclusion that see- ing was not an end aimed at, but simply happened, when chance brought the requisite apparatus together. 39 Even in man's inventions, accident, i.e., an accidental inspiration or thought, plays a part — only the accident does not happen to most men. 40 Reason itself may have come by accident into the world, i.e., in an irrational way. 41 For with chances of various kinds, it may sooner or later happen that some throws of the dice are so lucky that they have all the appearance of design ; ** the best kind of results may thus arise on occasion — happy hits, we may say, on nature's part. 3 Accordingly Nietzsche speaks of the chaos (rather than cosmos) of existence. 43 He does not mean that things happen without a cause, but apart from any plan or ordering thought: chance is the opposite of design, out of which correlation it means nothing. 44 Chance happenings have causes behind them like everything else, and hence are necessitated like everything else. 45 Law in nature, however, he regards as a questionable conception. If people are fond of it, they must either be thinking that all natural things follow their law in free obedience — in which case they really admire the morality of nature — or else the idea of a 37 The Wanderer etc., § 182. 88 Human, etc., § 238. 39 Dawn of Day, § 122. 40 Ibid., § 363. 41 Ibid., § 123. *-Ibid., § 130. •» Joyful Science, §§ 109, 277. 44 He goes so far as to argue on this basis that in nature at large there is, strictly speaking, no chance : " If you know that there are no aims, you know also that there is no chance: for only in connection with a world of aims has the word ' chance ' a meaning" (Joyful Science, § 109). 45 Once, it must be admitted, Nietzsche contrasts chance with neces- sity (Ecce Homo, II, §8), relapsing, we must suppose, for the moment into popular modes of expression. GENERAL OUTLOOK 107 Creative Mechanician delights them. The conception is really an attempt to humanize necessity — a last refuge of mythological fancy. 46 In this moving chaos man arises, with no end of causes behind him — but not from any superior design. 47 He arises, and he passes away — he is as perishable as any other creature. Some fancy that man is possessed of a soul in the sense of something separable from his bodily organization and capable of surviving it; Nietzsche does not think so. k "In former times the effort was to win a sense of the glory of man, by pointing to his divine origin: it is a forbidden way now, for at the door to it stands, along with other terrible creatures, the ape, who shows his teeth understandingly, as if to say: no further in this direction! So now we look in the opposite direction: the way whither humanity goes shall serve to show its glory and likeness to God. Alas, with this also nothing is proven ! At the end of this way stands the funeral-urn of the last man and grave-digger (with the inscription 'nihil humani a me alienum puto'). However high humanity may have developed itself — and perhaps it will be lower at the end than at the beginning — there is no transition for it into a higher order, any more than there is an ascent to god-likeness and eternity for the ant and the earwig at the close of their 'earthly course.' Becoming draws having been in tow after it: why should there be an exception from this eternal play for some little planet, or again for a little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!" 48 Another passage is to similar effect, "In the midst of the ocean of becoming, we awake on an island which is not bigger than a boat, we adventuring and wandering birds, and look around us for a little while : we do so as quickly and as curiously as possible, for how quickly may a wind blow us away or a wave sweep over the island, so that nothing is left of us! But here, in this little space, we find other wandering birds and hear of earlier ones — and so we live a precious moment of knowing and of guessing, with happy flapping of wings and twittering with one another, and in spirit venture out on the ocean, no less proud than it. ' ' 49 One might turn these pictures 46 Mixed Opinions etc., §9. 4B Dawn of Day, §49. 47 Cf. The Wanderer etc., §14. 4B Ibid., § 314. 108 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER into abstract philosophemes, but it is unnecessary; nor need one comment on their mournful undertone. Sometimes, indeed, our mortality is spoken of in a different tone. Nietzsche was a man to accept things as they are and make the best of them — and once, after saying that "we have lost one interest, the 'after death' question no longer concerns us/' he speaks of this as "an unspeakable benefit, too recent to be fully appreci- ated. " ^ He even asks if it is not shameless to wish an eternal continuance of ourselves. "Have you then no thought of all the rest of things that would have to endure you for all eternity, as they have endured you hitherto with a more than Christian patience ? " 51 But I suspect that he makes a virtue of necessity in speaking in this way ; his deeper feeling did not really change, and we shall come on traces of it in his last period. 52 Nietzsche views man largely in what I may call a physio- / logical light. Our consciousness is not the core of our being — it is intermittent, waxes and wanes ; as a late development of the organic, it is something imperfect and weak — it may lead astray as well as give help. 531 Among the signs of progress in the nineteenth century is to be reckoned the placing of the health of the body before that of the soul, and conceiving the latter as resulting from, or at least conditioned by, the former. 54 A drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may make one's life unspeakably miserable and hard, so that we suffer mor^e from this drop than Prometheus did from his vulture. 55 Varying foods may have varying spiritual effects. It is a question whether pessimism (of the ordinary type) may not be the after-effect of a wrong diet, the spread of Buddhism being an instance : K Nietzsche discourses especially on the danger of vegetarianism. 57 Possibly the European unrest of recent times 80 Ibid., § 72. 01 Ibid., §211. 52 Pp. 173-4. 83 Joyful Science, § 11. B * Will to Power, §§ 117, 126. I quote occasionally from later works, when Nietzsche's present views simply find further statement in them. 55 Dawn of Day, § 83. 56 Joyful Science, §134 — he takes pains to say "the spread of Bud- dhism {not its origin)." Pessimism is regarded as a symptom rather than a problem in Will to Power, § 38. 67 Joyful Science, §145. Cf., on the effect of poor nourishment in general, The Wanderer etc., § 184. GENERAL OUTLOOK 109 may have to do with the fact that "our forefathers, the whole Middle Ages, thanks to the effect of German propensities on Europe, were given to drink; Middle Ages — that phrase sig- nifies the alcoholic poisoning of Europe." 58 So fearfulness, from which so much evil comes in the world, is before all a physiological state. 59 Even the mental and moral disposition of those to whom the ascetic priest ministers may be explained physiologically; their "sinfulness" may be not so much fact, as an interpretation of fact, namely physiological depression. 60 For a similar reason the views of old age should not be treated too reverentially, even when they are those of a philosopher, nor are we to give too much weight to the judgments we form at the end of the day: fatigue and weariness may be uncon- sciously reflected in them. 61 Morality itself may have a varying tinge according to physiological conditions: the morality of increasing nerve-force is joyous and restless ; that of diminishing nerve-force — in the evening or in the case of the sick or the aged — is of a passive, expectant, sad, or even gloomy char- acter. 62 Philosophy may also vary, according as it springs from a deficiency or from a superabundance of life-energy. Every philosophy which ranks peace higher than war, every ethics which has a negative conception of happiness, every metaphysics and physics which recognizes a finale, some kind of an ultimate state, every predominant aesthetic or religious longing for an apart, beyond, without, above, allows us to raise the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. In- deed the unconscious disguising of physiological needs under the mantle of the objective, the ideal, and the purely spiritual goes shockingly far, and Nietzsche says that he has often asked himself whether, broadly speaking, philosophy has not been principally hitherto an interpretation of the body — and a mis- understanding of the oodyP 58 Joyful Science, § 134. 59 Dawn of Day, §538. 60 Genealogy of Morals, III, §§ 16, 17. 61 Dawn of Day, § 542. 82 Ibid., §368. 98 Preface, § 2, to Joyful. Science. 110 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER in Undoubtedly all this has a materialistic sound, and yet when we notice Nietzsche's ultimate philosophical views, we find that he is as far from materialism as ever. 64 This material organization on which our higher life is dependent is itself only statable in mental terms. Matter — the popular (and perhaps I might add, the popular scientific) notion of some kind of permanent self-existing substance — is illusory ; it is as much an error as the God (being) of the Eleatics. 65 We deal with phe- nomena (mental images) in the whole range of our knowledge. One set of them is connected with another set — that is all we can say. We speak of cause and effect, but we simply describe in this way — we explain nothing.™ The quality resulting from every chemical process is as much a wonder after as before ; so is a continuation of motion; nobody has "explained" push. And how could we explain ? We deal only with things that do not exist, i.e., lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces, all our own pictures and creations. Science is a humanizing of things — it is ourselves we learn to describe more accurately, as we describe things and their succession. Possibly, yes probably, there never is such a doubleness as we imply in speaking of cause and effect — there being before us in reality a continuum, from which we isolate now this piece and now that — just as, on the other hand, we think that we perceive motion, when we only conclude it, what we perceive being only isolated points. Our very imagery of cause and effect may thus prevent insight into the real connection. 66 All this is said by Nietzsche in general, but it applies to the point now in hand and shows that the assertions of the dependence of the mind upon the body must not be taken too literally." The fact is, so far as Nietzsche can see at present, we cannot get out of our mental being to explain it. Having concluded, after his analysis of Schopenhauer's metaphysical pretensions, that we do not know reality, but only our sensations or pictures •* Later (Genealogy of Morals, III, 16) he distinctly says that with a physiological view like that above described, one may still be the strictest opponent of all materialism. eB Joyful Science, § 109. "Ibid., § 112; Dawn of Day, § 121. ULTIMATE VIEW 111 of reality, he is as hopelessly shut in to subjectivism as Kant was. Our own actions are essentially unknown, as truly as outer objects are. 67 In an aphorism entitled "In Prison, " he says, "There is absolutely no escaping, no way of slipping or stealing into the actual world. We are in our web, we spiders, and whatever we catch in it, we can catch nothing but what allows itself to be caught in our kind of web. " 68 In another place he speaks of the mind as a mirror: "if we attempt to consider the mirror in itself, we discover nothing but the things in it; if we try to lay hold of the things, we come finally to nothing beyond the mirror." 69 "Why does not man see things as they are? He stands in the way of them; he covers the things. ' ' 70 Once he even raises the question whether there are any things independent of us, 71 — he only raises it, however, for his practically constant underlying belief is that independent realities exist, however unknown. His attitude is strikingly (I might say, unconsciously) exhibited in a comparison of the world of our experience to a dream, in the midst of which the dreamer becomes sufficiently awake to know that it is a dream, and yet feels that he must go on dreaming, as otherwise, like a sleep-walker who must dream on if he is not precipitously to fall, he might perish. 72 The dream (appearance, Schein) is spoken of indeed as the active, living thing — a world of inde- pendent reality is practically ignored. And yet the very fact that he speaks of a dream, and of becoming half -awake in it, shows that the idea of independent reality shimmers in the back- ground of his mind, since a dream that is not contrasted with a waking state is not a dream at all. Practically then in this second period Nietzsche is shut up in the phenomenalist position, but with reservations or implica- tions which keep us from calling him a phenomenalist. He says on the one hand : we have no knowledge of reality — every metaphysical thought is far from the truth ; 73 even in religion, \ 67 Dawn of Day, § 116; cf. Will to Power, § 477. 68 Dawn of Day, § 117; cf. Joyful Science, § 57, where he makes light of the realists and their claim to see things as they are. 69 Dawn of Day, § 243. 70 Ibid., § 348. 71 Ibid., §119. 72 Joyful Science, § 54. 78 Human, etc., § 15. 112 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER art, morality we do not touch the nature of the world in itself — no surmise (Ahnung) we can make takes us beyond the realm of ideas (Vorstellung) ; 7i while many have died for their con- victions, it is probable that no one has ever sacrificed himself for the truth; 75 "philosophical systems" are shining mirages; 76 "metaphysics might be described as the science which treats of the fundamental errors of man, as if they were fundamental truths." 77 But, on the other hand, he always implies that things have another manner of existence than that which they have in us. Even when he asserts that this other manner of exist- ence does not practically concern us and is as much a matter of indifference as a chemical analysis of the water would be to a sailor in a storm, he presupposes the other manner of existence ; 78 even when he asserts that the questions of idealism and realism relate to a region where neither belief nor knowledge is necessary, a sort of nebulous swamp-land beyond the reach of investigation and reason, and pleads for our becoming good neighbors to the things that lie near, 79 he implies that the outlying region and swamp-land exist. Realistic implications are also evident in the strange suggestion that things as they exist in themselves may be far less significant than things as they appear, that the independent realities, which we covet so much to know, might, if we came on them, turn out so poor and empty that they would excite an Homeric laughter. 80 Indeed, he thinks that men have not ordinarily sought truth in the past, but simply ideas that would be serviceable to them — continuing a line of thought on which we have seen him starting in the earlier period. The antithesis is implied in a general remark like the following: "As soon as you wish to act, you must close the door to doubt — says the practical man. And 7 * ibid., § 10. 75 Ibid., § 630. 76 Mixed Opinions etc., § 31. 77 This quotation I borrow from Riehl, op. cit., p. 61, being unable to locate it. 78 Cf. Human, etc., § 9. 70 The Wanderer etc., § 16; cf. Human, etc., § 532. He tries to preach a gospel of contented ignorance of first and last things in this period, and exalts Epicurus more or less as a model (cf. The Wanderer etc., §§7, 16). 80 Human, etc., §§ 16, 29. Cf. also later utterances, Beyond Good and Evil, § 34; Genealogy of Morals, III, § 7; Will to Power, § 586B. ULTIMATE VIEW 113 do you not fear to be deceived in this way? — answers the theoretic man." 81 For all such warnings, however, the prac- tical man goes on his way, and Nietzsche does not upbraid him. Truth may, of course, be useful, 82 but error may be useful too 83 — we have no guarantee that it is always the true that is helpful to life; there is no pre-established harmony between the two. 81 The illogical man has often been useful or even necessary — and so with the departure from perfect justice in judgments, so with error about the worth of life. 85 Illusions may be a source of force, and it might be well if there were two com- partments in man 's brain, one for illusions, the other for science to regulate them and keep them from doing harm. 86 Without two capital errors, belief in identity and belief in free-will, mankind, in any distinctive sense, would never have arisen — for, to mention only the second, its ground feeling is that man is free in a world of unfreedom, a marvelous exception, a super- animal, half a God. 87 Doubt, intellectual scrupulousness, only arise late, are always relatively weak factors in human life, and really can only be allowed a limited role there. 88 Philosophy itself — what has gone by that name — has ordinarily been ani- mated by concern not so much for " truth,' ' as for health, growth, power, life, and the future — Nietzsche knows that it is a daring proposition to throw out, but he ventures it. 89 Errors may even have a part in making reality — in making character, for instance, and in making history. 90 Pretend to a virtue (kindness, honor), and the result may be in time that you have it ; 91 act on a belief, and you may win it — as Bonier said to Wesley, "Preach the faith till you have it, and then you will 81 Dawn of Day, §519.. 82 He even asks why, if science were not linked with the usefulness of what is known, we should concern ourselves about science (Mixed Opinions etc., § 98) . 88 Ibid., §§ 13, 26. 84 Human, etc., §517; cf. §§30, 36, 38, 227. He even says, "Error has made men out of animals [the reference is to the ideas of responsibility and free-will, see ante, p. 55] ; is it possible that truth may turn man -again into an animal?" (Human, etc., §519). 85 Ibid., §§31-3. 88 Ibid., § 251. 87 The Wanderer etc., § 12. 88 Joyful Science, §§ 110, 121. 89 Preface, § 2, to Joyful Science. 90 Dawn of Day, §§ 115, 307. 01 Ibid., § 248; cf. Joyful Science, § 356. 114 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER preach because you have it." 92 Errors, when useful to life, may in time become incorporated in the living organism and act as impulses there. 93 Yet errors are errors, whatever their effect, whatever their beneficence. The question of the useful- ness of an idea is separate from that of its truth. 94 Not only does the agreeableness or comfort of an opinion prove nothing, its necessity to life proves nothing — among the conditions of life, error may be one. 95 92 Dawn of Day, § 325. 9 » Werke, XI, 425-6. 04 Human, etc., §§ 30, 36. 85 Ibid., §§ 120, 131, 161, 36, 635 (the inspiring and invigorating not thereby true), Dawn of Day, §§ 90, 424, 73, Joyful Science, § 121. I CHAPTER XI ATTITUDE TO MORALS In turning to Nietzsche's attitude to morals in this period, I find it convenient to distinguish between his views about moral- ity and his own moral views. For morality may be taken as an historical phenomenon like any other, and studied and analyzed ; and it is in fact the critical analysis of morality as an objective fact in history which now chiefly engages him. At the same time he puts forth ethical views of his own to a limited extent. First, then, as to historical morality. Here too as in the theoretic realm he comes on elements of illusion. Man thinks he is free, and thereby distinguished from the animal world; notions of responsibility, of desert, of guilt, habits of praising and blaming, of rewarding and punishing, arise. But Nietzsche sees no way out of determinism. Causes lie behind human actions as behind all other events in nature. That in given cir- cumstances a given individual might have acted otherwise than as he did is something he cannot admit ; and it is only turning this around to say that the consciousness of freedom is illusory. Kant and Schopenhauer had saved themselves from this con- sequence by postulating^ metaphysical being for man — saying that while as a phenomenon in time his actions are determined, his real being is timeless and not subject to the laws of phe- nomenal succession. But Nietzsche has now left metaphysical views behind (at least, they no longer count for him) — and this way of escape is not open. a Seeing illusion in free-will is nothing novel, b and if there is any novelty in Nietzsche's procedure at this point, it is in the thoroughgoing way in which he follows up the consequences of the admission. I mention them simply as he states them — and he hardly more than states them, deeming extended argumenta- 115 116 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER tion superfluous. The consequences are far from agreeable in some cases. For example, responsibility goes, and he calls it a bitter drop — "the bitterest which one bent on knowing must swallow. ' ' 1 Through feelings of responsibility man has lifted himself out of his animality: it was a necessary illusion ("Moral ist Nothliige") ? Yet the conclusion is inevitable: without freedom, no responsibility. We are as responsible for our dreams as for our waking conduct — that is, we are responsi- ble for neither. Cruel men are no more responsible for what they do, than granite is for being granite. 3 Guilt also goes. Although judges of witches and witches themselves have been convinced of their guilt, there was no guilt, and it is so with guilt of every kind. 4 Desert of praise or blame goes (which is not saying that either may not be dealt out for effect) ; 5 c and so with praising and blaming ourselves. Bad conscience is like a dog biting against a stone — a stupidity. 6 Giving way to remorse is to add to our first folly a second; if we have done harm, let us do good — this is the better way. 7d Indeed, things being necessarily what they are, "wrong" in any absolute sense disappears from the universe, and "ought," as contradictory to what is, becomes meaningless. 8 All actions are innocent; even the emancipated individual who becomes "pious" again (a type Nietzsche particularly dislikes) only does what he has to do — though it may be a sign of degeneration going on within him. 9 Revolutionary and more or less unwelcome as all this is, Nietzsche sees compensations, and in some ways has a sense of relief — for the dark shadow of sin vanishes and the world is clothed in innocence again. 10 Later on he says along this same general line, though with a special shade of meaning [he has been speaking of the liberating effect of comparative studies], "We understand all, we experience all, we have no longer 1 Human, etc., § 107. 2 Ibid., § 40. 8 Dawn of Day, § 128; Human, etc., § 43; cf. Will to Power, § 288. * Joyful Science, § 250 ; cf . Mixed Opinions etc., § 386. Human, etc., § 105; cf. Will to Power, § 318. 6 The Wanderer etc., §38; cf. Human, etc., §133. 7 The Wanderer etc., § 323. 8 Human, etc., § 34. 9 Daivn of Day, §§ 148, 56. As to the innocence of becoming in general, Bee later utterances, Werke, XIII, 127, § 289; XIV, 308, § 141. 10 Human, etc., §124. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 117 hostile feeling in us. . . . 'All is good' — it costs us effort to deny. We suffer, if we are ever so unintelligent as to become party against a thing"; he even suggests that in this way scholars best fulfil today the teaching of Christ. 11 If we bid farewell to a passion, he would have us do it without hate — otherwise we learn a second passion ; he thinks that the souls of Christians, which have freed themselves from sin, are usually ruined by the hatred of sin — "Look at the faces of great Chris- tians ! They are the faces of great haters. ' ' 12 Nietzsche becomes very warm against punishment — he would banish it out of the world. 13 It is really anger and revenge, to which we give a good name so as to have good conscience in inflicting it. e The truth is that the evil-doer is not even the same person that he was when he committed the evil deed; we punish a scapegoat. In any case, the punishment does not purify him, is no expiation ; on the contrary, it soils more than the transgression itself. 14 The punishment here in mind is that which masks as justice (the wrong-doer receiving his deserts) ; viewed as a deterrent, however (whether for others or for the wrong-doer himself in the future), and wrought in that spirit, Nietzsche does not question but rather asserts its utility. The wrong-doer by suffering it benefits society, and a sense of this should determine his mood, which should not be remorse, but the feeling that having done evil, he is now doing good — he should be free to consider himself a benefactor of humanity. 15 Nietzsche is also troubled about the way society has to proceed to protect itself against crime — about the tools it has to create and make use of, the policemen, jailors, executioners, not for- getting the public prosecutors and the lawyers; indeed, "let one ask whether the judge himself and the punishment and the whole course of judicial procedure are not in their effect on non-criminals depressing rather ^than elevating phenomena. " As often, he says, as we turn men into means to the ends of society and sacrifice them, all our higher humanity grieves. 16 11 Will to Power, §218. 12 Dawn of Day, § 411. 18 The Wanderer etc., § 183; Dawn of Day, §§ 13, 202. "Dawn of Day, §§ 252, 236. 10 Human, etc., §105; The Wanderer etc., §323. 10 The Wanderer etc., §186. / 118 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER He is aware that there is some danger to society in the doctrines of general human innocence and unresponsibility — they might throw courts and the course of civil justice out of gear; there was similar danger, he observes, in the teaching of Jesus to just the opposite effect, namely that since all are sinful, they should not judge one another. 17 But Nietzsche is no revolutionary, and while he wished to see civil institutions purged of the spirit of revenge, he had no desire to abolish them. He did not even oppose capital punishment, and wished to allow an incurable criminal, who became a horror to himself, to end his own days. His concern was chiefly for a point of view, namely, that the criminal is one deranged or sick, and should be treated as such — not then with patronizing compassion, but with a physician's penetration, a physician's good will: he has subtle reflections to offer in this connection on the psychology of crime. 18 One of his hopeful thoughts for the future is that there will be institu- tions where men can betake themselves for spiritual cures, according to their varying needs — in one place, anger would be fought, in another lust, and so on. 19 f He can also imagine indi- viduals and whole groups abstaining from recourse to the courts on their own account, after the primitive Christian fashion. 20 As for himself he says, ''Better allow yourself to be robbed than have scarecrows about you to prevent it — such is my taste." 21 * i ii Nietzsche also criticises certain ideas which come nearer the content of morality. He fincjs an element of illusion in the view that good impulses and evil impulses differ in kind. He thinks that in all man does, he acts for his preservation, his pleasure, his advantage. 11 Some actions are, however, more intelligent than others, and this fact gives rise to diverse judgments. It is a view not unlike that of Socrates and Plato, who held that man always does the good, i.e., what seems so to him, according to the grade of his intellect, the measure of his rationality. Acts called evil are really stupid. Good acts are sublimated evil ones; evil acts 17 Ibid., § 81. 20 Ibid., XI, 377, § 573. 18 Dawn of Day, § 202. 2l Joyful Science, § 184. 19 Werke, XI, 377, § 573. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 119 clumsy, unintelligent good ones. In accordance with such an understanding of things, Nietzsche raises the question whether humanity might not transform itself from a moral into a wise humanity. 22 * Especially is there illusion in the idea of unegoistic actions, by which Schopenhauer, and he himself at the outset, had set such store. He by no means denies the genuineness of the actions which go by that name; he throws no suspicion on the reality of benevolence, self-sacrifice, heroism — his reasoning is different from that of La Rochefoucauld; but he thinks that when we look for the ultimate source of such actions, we find the same desire for personal gratification leading to them which leads to all other actions. 23 A mother, for instance, gives her child what she denies herself — sleep, the best food, on occasion sacrificing her health and her means. Is this to be treated as an exception to the rule of human conduct — a wonder in the world, something, as Schopenhauer said, "impossible and yet actual"? Or is the fact simply that the mother sacri- fices certain impulses to other impulses, yielding to the strongest — that she nowise differs, so far as the psychology of the matter goes, from a stubborn person who would rather be shot than go a step out of his way to accommodate some one else ? 24 We do not and cannot cease to be egos seeking for personal gratifica- tion, no matter what we do. And yet Schopenhauer thought unegoistic motives the essential mark of a moral action — and the idea is not uncommon today. 25 j Again, morality tends to draw the line so sharply between \ good and evil that one cannot be supposed to come out of the other. Nietzsche, however, finds evil sometimes passing into good. The passions excited in war, the impersonal hate, the cold-blooded killing with good conscience, the proud indifference to great losses, may in time be translated into spiritual equiva- lents, and add to the sum of available energy in the workshops of the mind. 26 Destruction and the destructive spirit may pre- pare the way for new things under the sun, new forms of life. 22 Human, etc., §§ 102, 107. 23 Cf. The Wanderer etc., §20; Dawn of Day, §103. 24 Human, etc., §57; cf. Werke, XI, 327, §439. 26 Human, etc., § 133. "Ibid., §277. 120 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER As mighty glaciers hollow out valleys and in time leave meadows and woods and brooks in their track, so frightful human ener- gies — what we commonly sum up as evil (das Bose) — may be cyclopean architects and road-builders of humanity. 27 Even deception, violence, ruthless self-interest may play a part — and a genius of culture might employ them with so sure a hand that he would seem like an evil demon, and yet his aims, now and then shining through, be great and good, and he himself have angel wings. 28 We cannot build good "on good alone," as Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior" does — at least on what is commonly called good. A spirit of contradiction may lie at the basis of one man's virtue; a readiness to agree at the basis of another's; a third may draw all his morality out of his lonely pride, and a fourth out of a social impulse. That is, what is called evil, as well as what is called good, may be the basis of good, and the most inept teacher of the four types of indi- viduals mentioned would be the moral fanatic who failed to bear this in mind. 29 The very ideas of what is good or evil may vary. A lonely man may console himself by thinking that he is ahead of his time; but the world may not go his way. 30 Even a good con- science does not necessarily attend a good man. Science is something good, and yet it has often come into the world stealthily, in roundabout ways, feeling like a criminal, or at least like a smuggler. Good conscience has as its first stage bad Conscience — for everything good is sometime new, i.e., unusual, against use and custom, unmoral [in the primitive sense of that term — the German here is wider die Sitte, unsittlicJi], and gnaws at the heart of its discoverer. 31 In other words, good conscience is a late fruit of bad conscience. in All this, however, does not mean that there is nothing constant in morality — that in a broad way it is not a tolerably distinct and recognizable phenomenon in history. What is "Ibid., §246. 28 Ibid., § 241. 29 The Wanderer etc., §70; cf. Mixed Opinions etc., §91. 80 Human, etc., § 375. 81 Mixed Opinions etc., § 90. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 121 most constant about it is its form ; but within limits the content of it tends to be constant, too. Historically speaking, that conduct is always moral, ethical (moralisch, sittlich, ethisch) which conforms to a long-estab- , lished law or tradition. The fundamental antithesis is not j between "unegoistic" and "egoistic," but between being bound / and not being bound by traditional law. To practise revenge is moral, if revenge belongs to established custom — as it did among the older Greeks. A feeling of respect for what is authoritative is the fundamental note; and the older, i.e., the more authoritative, the custom, the greater the respect, until at last the custom becomes holy and the respect turns into rever- ence. The morality of piety, Nietzsche remarks, is a much older morality than that which calls for unegoistic actions. 32 For most of us even now the content of conscience is what was regularly required of us apart from any reason when we were young by those whom we revered or feared: when we ask "why?" we leave the realm of conscience proper. 33 "Good," as more than "moral," is applied to those who obey the tradi- tional law as if by nature, after long inheritance, hence easily and gladly. How the customs of a community arise is another question — one which belongs rather to history or sociology than to ethics. Only after they exist do moral distinctions have a meaning. Nietzsche attributes them broadly at this time to the com- munity's instinct for self-preservation. Such and such prac- tices are seen [supposed] to be useful to the community, hence they are favored. They may be of the most varied character — some may not really be -beneficial to the community, but being thought to be they become part of customary law. 34 Moral action is thus at bottom adoption by the individual of the com- \ munity's point of view. Utility is the standard, but public not private utility. 35 The logic is: the community is worth more than the individual, and a lasting advantage is to be preferred to a fleeting one, hence the lasting advantage of the community 82 Human, etc., § 96. 83 The Wanderer etc., §52; cf. §212. On fear as a moral motive, see Werke, XI, 208-11. 84 Human, etc., § 96. 35 The Wanderer etc., § 40. 122 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER is to be placed unconditionally before the advantage of the indi- vidual, particularly his momentary well-being, but also before his lasting advantage or even his continuance in life. If the individual suffers from an arrangement which benefits the whole, if he is stunted, goes to pieces on its account — the custom must none the less be maintained, the sacrifice made. This is from the community's point of view. The individual himself may think differently; he may invert the propositions and say in his own case that the individual is worth more than the many, and that present enjoyment — a moment in paradise — is to be rated higher than a dull continuance of indifferent states. But the community has the upper hand, and in it and under it the individual is trained — trained not as an individual, but as a member of a whole, one of a majority; and the normal outcome of the training is that he takes the side of the majority (der Einzelne sich selbst majorisirt) : this indeed is what moral- ity essentially means. 36 The training is a long historic (one might say, prehistoric) process. In subjecting individuals, checking their egoisms, binding them together, the community operates at first more or less by force ; it struggles long perhaps with their selfishness and wilfulness. Only late does free obedience arise. But when this is reached and it becomes at last almost instinctive, pleasure coming to be associated with it, as with all things habitual and natural, it receives the name of virtue. 37 Individuals now not merely submit willingly to the ordinary social restrictions, they are ready to sacrifice on occasion, not holding back their very life. And this, not in violation of the general psychological law already mentioned that every one seeks personal gratifica- tion, but because gratification is now found in doing whatever serves the common weal. 38k In the course of this developmental process there is another result. As stated, morality has its basis in social utility. But in time actions come to be performed without thought or even knowledge of this — perhaps from fear or reverence for those 88 Mixed Opinions etc., § 89. "Human, etc., §§99, 97; The Wanderer etc., §40. 88 Cf. Human, etc., § 57, as to the soldier's sacrifice; also Werke, IX, 156, as to the state as perhaps the highest and most reverend object which the blind and egoistic mass in the ancient world knew. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 123 who immediately require them, or from being accustomed from childhood up to see others perform them, or from benevolence, since the practice of them creates joy and approving faces everywhere about one, or from vanity because they are praised. In other words, the original reason for the action (or the custom to which it conforms) is lost out of mind: the custom stands as a thing by itself — actions that conform to it are good on their own account. Now such actions are called moral par- ticularly — not of course because they are done from any of the special minor motives mentioned, but because they are not done from motives of conscious utility. 39 1 A late echo of such a view appears, I may add, in Kant's treating reverence for the law, irrespective of any utilitarian considerations, as the only prop- erly moral motive. A second reason for the traditional contrast between morality and utility has been already hinted at. Com- munities had to struggle long with individuals seeking their own advantage or utility — so long and so hard, that every other motive came to be rated higher than utility. It appeared then as if morality had not grown out of utility, while in truth it grew out of social utility, which had great difficulty in putting itself through against all manner of private utilities. 40 Customs and customary norms widely vary — indeed, so widely that, since morality is simply conformity to them, there may seem to be nothing really constant about it. And yet Nietzsche notes that some actions are quite universally regarded as good and others as evil, inasmuch as they affect a com- | munity's welfare in such direct and obvious ways. Amid all the variations of norms, benevolence, pity, and the like are universally regarded as useful, and at the present time it is pre-eminently the kindly, helpful individual who is called "good." So to injure one's fellows has been felt in all the moral codes of different times to be harmful, and today when we use the word "evil," we have the willing injuring of a fellow particularly in mind. 41 "Good" and "evil" have been used thus far in quite gen- 89 The Wanderer etc., § 40. *° Ibid., §40; cf. Human, etc., §39. 41 Human, etc., § 96; cf. The Wanderer etc., § 190. In Joyful Science, § 345, Nietzsche appears to question a moral consensus, but only in appearance, and in his closing period he reaffirms it. 124 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER eral senses. But Nietzsche has a keen scent for shades of meaning, and he thinks that at times these words have par- ticular significations. For instance, to a ruling tribe or class "good" has certain associations which are quite different from those that it has to a weak and subject population — associa- tions of power, self-satisfaction, and pride. "Evil" (schlecht), the opposite of "good," they apply to those contrasted with themselves whom they look down upon, the weaker, incoherent mass whom they have subjected. To this extent "good" and "evil" are like high and low, master and slave. "Evil," so understood, does not apply to an enemy who is strong — in Homer, Trojan and Greek alike are good; "evil" is an epithet of contempt. On the other hand, among those who are sub- jected and powerless, and whose predominant sentiment is one of fear, practically every other being is evil (hose), i.e., capable of injuring them — they do not trust one another enough to form a community, or more than the rudest kind of one, and this is why they easily become subject, or else disappear. These con- trasted meanings of good and evil are very imperfectly worked out now — we shall come on a fresh and much fuller statement in Nietzsche's succeeding period. 42 I pass over Nietzsche's analysis ("dissection" he sometimes calls it) of special moral conceptions, like justice, equality, rights, and duties ; he goes on along the same lines in his later period and it will be convenient to treat the material together in dealing with that period. I also pass over his keen exposure of the part which vanity and self-interest play in much that passes as moral conduct, though every student of morality would do well to attend to it. m rv Turning now to his own moral views, we find him still with a sense of the greatness of a dominating idea or aim, 43 and if he does not soar so high and has not so confident a tone as before, he is nearer to life and actuality, or, as we might say, more human. The eager thought and expectation of something " See chap. xix. The above paragraph is based on Human, etc., § 45. The distinction between " hose " and " schhcht " is not at all clearly marked here. *' 3 The Wanderer etc., § 230. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 125 great and almost superhuman to come, and of a new German (or European) culture which should look that way, have more or less abated, but he honors the philosopher as before and counts as the highest pleasures those of conceiving works of art and doing noble deeds — so that in effect the old trinity still lingers in his mind. 44 With all his determinism, and perhaps quite consistently with it, he has a sense of human power. Not only can man know, he can do. Active natures, he says, not so much follow the saying, "Know thyself," as feel an inner com- mand, ' ' Will a self — and so become one. ' ' 45 We can deal with our impulses more or less as a gardener does with his plants, encouraging now this one and now that: "Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener, hut the soil for his plants!" 46 We can strip from our passions their fearful character — it is by neglect that they become monsters; he who conquers them is like a colonist who has become master of forests and swamps and can now turn them to account. 47 "Every day is ill-used and a danger for the next in which we have not at least once denied ourselves in some way : this gymnastics is indispensable, if we wish to keep the joy of being our own master. ' ' 48 Nietz- sche is sometimes compared to Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias"; he is at least not like him so far as Callicles says, "The tem- perate man is a fool ; only in hungering and eating, in thirsting and drinking, in having all his desires about him and gratifying every possible desire does man live happily." Nietzsche holds, indeed, that all men seek personal gratifica- tion, but he does not mean by this "self-indulgence," nor does he imply that men care for comfort, or luxury, or gain, or honor, or even continued existence more than anything else. The happinesses of different stages of human development [or of different kinds of men] are incomparable and peculiar. 49 The Greeks preferred power which drew upon itself much evil to weakness that experienced only good : the sense of power was itself pleasurable to them — better than any utility or good 44 Werke, X, 482. 45 Mixed Opinions etc., § 366. 49 Dawn of Day, §382. 47 The Wanderer etc., §§37, 53; cf. §65. 48 Ibid., § 305. 49 Dawn of Day, § 108; see also the conclusion of Human, etc., § 95. 126 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER name. 50 And what Nietzsche's own ideal is, where gratification lay for him, is suggested in what he says, after remarking on the sordid political parties of his day, "Live as higher men, and do evermore the deeds of the higher culture. ' ' 51 While he does not recognize, any more than earlier, the practicability of making every one an end in himself, while he thinks that we may easily overdo pity, and speaks of the need of discrimination and judgment, 52 his feelings of broad human sympathy and love are as strong as ever. The cold look which superior people have for their servants displeases him. 53 He finds it something fearful for a man to have less than three hundred Thaler a year, or to have to beg like a child and to humble himself. 54 He has even sentiment for the criminal, as we have seen — and speaks of our crime against him in that we treat him as a scamp (Schuft). At times a wondering sense of the worth of man as such comes over him: not only is nature too beautiful for us poor mortals, but man is, not merely one who is moral, but every man. 55 Really Nietzsche wishes (now as earlier) to consider all, and, though in varying ways, to give a meaning to every life. 56 This does not imply, however, that we must always be directly doing for others. One who makes a whole person out of himself, who developes all his peculiar individual being, may in the long run go further in contributing to the general advantage, than one who gives himself up to acts of benevolence and pity. 57 If egoism be taken in this higher sense, it may be questioned whether the egoistic is not useful in a much higher degree, even to other men, than the unego- istic. 58n The individual is thus still regarded in the light of a public utility, and so far Nietzsche does not in his own view transcend the utilitarian standpoint which he accredits to moral- ity in general. At the same time we feel that a different standpoint is 60 Dawn of Day, § 360. 81 Human, etc., § 480. 64 The Wanderer etc., §41. 58 Human, etc., § 64. 8 « Ibid., § 479. "Mixed Opinions etc., §342; cf. The Wanderer otc, §49. 68 Dawn of Day, § 202. 81 Human, etc., § 95; cf. Dawn of Day, § 174. " Werke, XI, 39, § 77. ATTITUDE TO MORALS 127 shaping itself in his mind, though at first tentatively and ques- tioningly. Communities, as we have seen, are the raison d'etre of morality — without them and their fixed norms (Sitten), it would never have arisen. The individual is looked at as existing for the community, as a function or functionary of it — apart from it he really means nothing, nothing of importance: such, in abstracto, is morality's standpoint. But just here Nietzsche finds himself questioning. Is this social [moral] significance all that a man has? Has he no properly individual being and value? May there not be acts of no advantage to society and still well worth while? He has a reflection like the follow- ing: There are certain things which we cannot do as members of society, though we may as private individuals, e.g., show mercy to a breaker of the law ; it is something which endangers society — society as such cannot do it or sanction it, though it may leave certain favored individuals free to do it (the king or executive), and we may all be happy when the privilege is exercised, though glad in our private hearts rather than as citizens. 59 The idea of a possible significance which is purely individual appears still more clearly in the following: "The active class of men lack ordinarily the higher type of activity; I mean the individual. They are active as officials, business men, scholars, i.e., as members of a species, but not as quite definite individuals and single men; in this respect they are lazy." 60 The paragraph closes: "All men may be classed, now as in all times, as slave and free; for whoever does not have three-fourths of the day to himself is a slave, whatever else he may be — statesman, business man, official, or scholar." We have already observed his feeling about society's turning men into functionaries to defend it against crime; but if man's being is in his social functioning, why should our "higher humanity" be hurt, and what is the sense in speaking of "sacri- fice"? There is the same implication in a distinction he makes, in speaking of factory slavery and organization, between a person and a screw — the underlying thought being that a screw' is for others' uses, a person for his own. 61 Indeed Nietzsche once raises a strange question (strange; 69 The Wanderer etc., § 34. 60 Human, etc., § 283. 81 Dawn of Day, § 206. 1 128 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER that is, to us of today with our prevailing social estimates of everything) : Grant that all men exist for social purposes and are functions of the social mechanism, what is the purpose of the mechanism itself? To quote his words, "Humanity uses up regardlessly each single person as fuel for its great ma- chines: but for what purpose then are the machines, if all single persons are only of use in maintaining them? Machines that are ends in themselves — is that the umana commedia?" 62 To us in these days society is an ultima ratio — if anything can be shown to be for the good of society, we are as completely satisfied as former ages were to have it shown that anything was for the glory of God. The import of Nietzsche's question will become clearer later on. 62 Human, etc., § 585. CHAPTER XII SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS AND FORECASTS In no way, perhaps, did Nietzsche come to differ more from Schopenhauer than in his sense of the possibility of change — whether in the individual or in society generally. What may be called the historical view of reality was almost lacking in Schopenhauer — owing in part no doubt to his conviction of the subjectivity of time. a No thoroughgoing Kantian, I may say, can believe in the final reality of an historical process. It is possible that Nietzsche's vivid sense of his own changes had something to do with the formal relinquishment of his early subjectivism as to time, which we shall come upon later on. b In any case the area of possible change for men and society is now large to him. Disillusioned about the near advent of a new tragic culture, he is not without compensatory thoughts. Is it not possible, he asks, to remove some evils rather than merely try to turn them into subjects of art, or to find consola- tion for them in religion ? 1 The ancients strove to forget the sufferings of existence, or else to make them agreeable through art — they worked palliatively ; we today wish to work prophy- lactically and attack the causes of suffering. 2 "Artists glorify continually — they do nothing else," he somewhat impatiently observes. 3 He thinks that art is a resource for moments and becomes dangerous when it sets up for more — a halt should be called to its fanatical pretensions. 4 With a touch of irony, he notes that removing evil may make it hard for the tragic poets, whose stock of material would so far diminish, and harder still for the priests, whose main business hitherto has been to nar- cotize ; but both classes, he thinks, belong to the non-progressive 1 Human, etc., § 108. 2 Mixed Opinions etc., § 187. 8 Joyful Science, § 85. 4 So Werke (1st ed.), XI, §347, as cited by Riehl, op. cit., p. 153. Human, etc., § 148, is to the same effect. 129 130 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER forces of society. 5 Progress is doubted by artists, and by meta- physical philosophers like Schopenhauer, but the very fact that we are now passing out of the tropical zone of culture with its violent contrasts and glowing colors, in which artists live, into the cooler, clearer, temperate zone of science, seems to him an instance of progress. 6 He questions indeed the necessity of progress and thinks that the days of the unconscious sort may be over; all the same, he urges that we might now consciously strive for a new culture, might create better conditions for the rise of human beings, for their nourishment, training, and instruction, might undertake an economic administration of the earth as a whole, measuring and distributing the forces of men wisely to this end — and this would surely be progress and would itself destroy the old mistrust of progress. 7 Nietzsche really began, as we have seen, with a general hope of this character; the difference is now that he has been somewhat chastened and no longer looks for appreciable help from art, and that he emphasizes certain practically necessary measures — something which preoccupation with art is liable to make one neglect. At the same time he continues to be thinker rather than himself reformer — believing, like Socrates, that "a private life, not a public one," is alone suitable to him, and not having any too high idea of existing states and of the kind of political activity they make necessary anyway. 8 As regards the economic structure of society, there is no change from the view that slavery is necessary. A higher cul- ture can arise only where there are the two castes of those who labor and those possessed of leisure, or, as he sometimes puts it, of compulsory labor and free labor. The way in which happiness (Gliick) is distributed is not vital when the produc- tion of a higher culture is at stake ; in any case it is those with leisure, to whom come the greater tasks, who have less ease in existence, who suffer more. If only there might be exchange between the castes, so that worn-out stocks and individuals in the upper could descend into the lower, and freer men among the lower could rise to the higher, a state would be reached, 5 Human, etc., § 108; cf. §§ 147, 148, 159. 8 Ibid., § 108. 7 Mixed Opinions etc., § 187. 8 Cf. The Wanderer etc., § 232; Dawn of Day, § 179. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 131 beyond which only indefinite wishes are possible. 9 Something of this sort was, I think, suggested by Huxley — and it shows that it was not a caste system, in the sense of one with impass- able barriers, that Nietzsche had in mind. More or less of this exchange — at least in the downward direction — takes place in caste societies as matter of fact. According to Professor Sumner, a Plantagenet was a butcher in a suburb of London a few years ago, and representatives of the great mediaeval families may now be found as small farmers, farm laborers, or tramps in England (Hardy using a fact of this kind in Tess of the D'Urbervilles). 10 If things like this could happen in both directions and with reasonable promptness and in accord- ance with a recognized social law, Nietzsche 's somewhat shadowy idea would be realized — of course, changes in the laws of inheri- tance would be necessary. As to property (Besitz), Nietzsche thinks that only those with mind should have it; otherwise it is an element of danger in a community. He who does not know how to use the free time which its possession gives strives for more — it is his way of diverting himself, of fighting boredom; and so from mod- erate possessions, which would suffice an intellectual man, comes wealth proper — a shining consequence of the lack of independence and intellectual poverty in one who amasses it, and at the same time something that excites the envy of the poor and uneducated, and prepares the way for a social revolu- tion. 11 Only up to a certain point does property serve its pur- pose of making one more independent and free; beyond that, property becomes the master and the owner a slave. 12 Nietzsche sometimes draws almost a contemptuous picture of mere riches, his attitude being only softened by the reflection that rich men are half -ashamed of themselves 13 [a type with which we do not appear to be acquainted in America]. He makes sport of the dinners of the rich, 14 gives instances of how the love of money makes one unscrupulous, 15 notes the unhappy effect of American 9 Human, etc., § 439. 10 W. G. Sumner, Folkways, p. 166. 11 Mixed Opinions etc., § 310. 12 Ibid., §317. 13 The Wanderer etc., § 209; Dawn of Day, § 186. 14 Dawn of Day, § 203. 16 Ibid., § 204. 132 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER gold-hunger on Europe in destroying the true estimate of leisure, in banishing ceremony from social intercourse, in making letter-writing the style-less, mindless thing it has come to be, in reducing pleasure to what overworked slaves have to have to recreate and amuse them — we all want to be "busy," and are ashamed of what makes for the ease and grace and dignity of life. 16 This does not mean that Nietzsche fails to appreciate what industry and commerce are doing for our time — he even says that it is the commercial class who keep us from falling back into barbarism (having in mind telegraphs, geographical ex- plorations, industrial inventions, etc.). 17 It is not commerce, but the motives behind it, the methods it too often pursues, that lead to reflections like those cited. Men are after money, and do almost anything for a rich return. 18 He finds exchange honorable and just, when each party is guided by the thought of what an article is worth (taking into account a variety of factors that determine worth) ; but when either is influenced by the thought of the needs of the other, he is only a refined robber and extortioner. 19 He notes that the merchant and the pirate were for a long time one and the same person, bartering being resorted to when force was not expedient; and current business morality now is really only a refinement of pirate morality — the maxim being to buy as cheaply and sell as dearly as possible. 20 It is accordingly the mark of the higher type of man not to be at home in trade. For a teacher, an official, an artist to sell his ability for the highest price, or to practise usury with it, is to drop to the shop-keeper's level. 21 A principal cause of bad conditions in Germany is, that there are far too many living off trade and wishing to live well there — hence reducing prices to the utmost limit to producers, raising them to the utmost limit to consumers, and drawing profit from the greatest possible injury to both. 22 16 Ibid., §§203-4; Joyful Science, §329. Cf. the characterization of modern " holidays," Dawn of Day, § 178. 17 WerJce, XI, 139, §441. 18 Joyful Science, § 42. 19 The Wanderer etc., §25; cf. Dawn of Day, §175. 20 The Wanderer etc., § 22. 21 Dawn of Day, § 308. 22 The Wanderer etc., § 282. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 133 Nietzsche's attitude to the laborer, whether we agree with it or not, cannot be called unsympathetic. We today, in con- trast with the ancient world, like to exalt labor, but he does not think that we treat the laborer much better, and he raises the question whether our talk has not some cynicism in it, or at least tartuferie. 230 He prefers plain speaking, and uses such terms as slavery, and in particular factory-slavery, much as the socialists do. 24 He has a sense of the unhappy effect of the modern machine upon the workers. It depersonalizes labor, strips it of its bit of humanity, turns men into machines. Al- though it liberates a vast amount of energy, it gives no impulse to higher development, to doing better work, to becoming more artistic; it shows how masses may co-operate by each one doing one thing, and so becomes a pattern for party organization and the conduct of war — its most general effect is to teach the uses of centralization. 25 Once he suggests certain remedies against what is injurious in machine-labor — first, frequent interchange of labor among those working at a machine or at different ma- chines; second, getting a comprehension of the total structure of the machine, including knowledge of its defects and the possibilities of improving it; he finds suggestive the example of a democratic state, which changes its officials often. 26 As to the deserts of labor, he gives up the attempt to estimate them — indeed, desert in general is for him an illusory conception, as we have already seen; all the same he finds considerations of utility in order, and believes that justice as a highly refined utility may well come into play. By this he means a long-range view of consequences, one which takes account not of a mo- mentary situation merely, but of the future as well, hence of the well-being of the laborer, his contentment in body and mind, so that he and his children may work well for coming genera- tions. From this point of view the exploitation of the laborer is a stupidity, a robbery at the expense of the future, an im- periling of society. Nietzsche thinks that we have now almost 28 Dawn of Day, §173; cf. Joyful Science, §§188, 329, which con- tinue the tone of Werke, IX, 145-51. On the ancient view, see also Sumner, op. cit., pp. 160-2. 24 Dawn of Day, § 206. 25 The Wanderer etc., §§ 288, 220, 218. 28 Werke, XI, 141, § 449. 134 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER come to a state of war in society; at least the costs of main- taining peace are becoming enormous, the folly of the exploiting classes being so great and so persistent. 27 He deems a social revolution not unlikely. 28 The educated classes in general are not without responsibility for the situation. If we complain of lack of discipline among the masses, the reproach falls back heavily on them ; the masses are just as good and just as bad as the educated are ; they set the tone, and elevate and corrupt the mass as they elevate or corrupt themselves. 29 A part of the trouble, too, lies in the lack of personal relation between employers and employed. We pay any one we know and respect, who does us a service, whether he be physician, artist, or hand-worker, as high as we can, perhaps beyond our means; but an unknown person we pay as little as practicable — the human element or relation disappears. 30 Manners, breeding are also a factor. It is strange, Nietzsche says, that subjection to powerful, fear-inspiring, even frightful persons, to tyrants and military commanders, is not so painfully felt, as subjection to unknown and uninteresting persons such as the great men of industry are: the laborer sees in his em- ployer usually only a cunning dog of a man, who drains him and speculates on his needs, and whose name, shape, and repu- tation are utterly indifferent to him. Manufacturers and great leaders of business have apparently lacked quite too much thus far all those forms and signs of a higher race, which first make persons interesting; had there been the distinction of the born noble in their look and bearing, perhaps socialism would never have developed among the masses. For these at bottom are ready for any kind of slavery, provided that the man who stands over them continually legitimates himself as one born to com- mand — by distinction of manner! The commonest man feels that such distinction is not to be improvised and that in it he honors the fruit of a long past — but the absence of it and the notorious manufacturer-vulgarity with red fat hands bring him to the thought that only accident and luck have elevated one man above another — and so he says to himself, "Let us try accident and luck! We will throw the dice!" — and socialism 27 The Wanderer etc., § 286. 2 " Ibid., XI, 377, § 572. 28 Werke, XI, 369, § 559. 30 The Wanderer etc., § 283. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 135 begins. 31 d And yet Nietzsche does not think it necessary that the workers shall always live as they live now. Dipping into the future, one of the things he conceives possible is that eco- nomic relations might be so ordered that there would be no longer the desperate anxiety about living and dying which prevails at present. 32 This does not mean, however, really rising out of slavery. If the workers are bent on that, they must be ready to leave existing civilization, become emigrants, colonists, incur risks of want and danger. He is evidently not without admira- tion for those who should take so heroic a step, and is ironical about those who are willing to remain screws, if they can only be better paid, i.e., who put a price upon their personality — ironical too about those who think, socialist fashion, that if they can only be screws in the great machine called the state, all will change, and their slavery become a virtue. "Poor, happy, and independent! this is all possible at the same time; poor, happy, and slave! — this also is possible" — though there can be little doubt which of the possibilities Nietzsche ranks higher. 33 ii Turning now to the political field, we find Nietzsche inclined to look at democracy as a fait accompli, and disposed to turn it to the best possible account. The "enlightenment" (Auf- klarung) of the eighteenth century was in itself a good, and if the changes naturally ensuing had been slow, if customs and institutions had been gradually modified, all would have been well. But with the French Revolution the movement took a violent turn, and trying to be sudden and complete the Revolu- tion became a pathetie and bloody piece of quackery. 346 Democracy, however, is not his ideal. He desires a rule of the intelligent rather than of the many, and once ventures to suggest a way for getting them. It would be really a process of self-selection, or rather mutual-selection. First, the honest and trustworthy of a country, who are at the same time in 31 Joyful Science, §40. 82 Werke, XI, 377, § 572. 33 Dawn of Day, §206. 34 The Wanderer etc., § 22; Dawn of Day, § 534; cf. Werke, XI, 369, §559. 136 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER some respect masters and experts, would segregate themselves, by a process of scenting one another out and reciprocal recog- nition ; and then from among these, such as are of the first rank in each special line would select themselves, again by reciprocal recognition and guarantees. These last would constitute the legislative body, and thus the highest grade of specialized ability would be brought to bear on the making of laws, each branch of specialists deciding on the questions in their province, the rest being honorable and decent enough to leave things in their hands. In this way laws would be strictly the outcome of the intelli- gence of the most intelligent. Now parties decide things, and every time that a vote is taken there must be hundreds of bad consciences — so many are ill-instructed, or incapable of judging, and simply follow others or are dragged along. Nothing lowers the dignity of a new law so much as the blush of dishonesty to which every party vote compels. Nietzsche is aware that it is easy to propose and hard to carry out such a scheme, but he has the hope that sometime faith in the utility of science and of men who know will arise in the most unwilling and replace the present faith in numbers. 35 Besides, he argues that the system of having everybody vote depends logically on everybody's wanting to vote, the will of a majority not being sufficient to constitute a universal rule, and he doubts whether all do want to vote now, since so many do not use the privilege they have. 36 But with all his argumentation he accepts the situation as he finds it, and he realizes the ironical side of it for the old ruling classes. 37 ''The poor reigning princes! All their rights are turning themselves now unexpectedly into claims, and all these claims soon sound like pretensions !" 38 King and emperor are becoming almost ciphers in ordinary times — symbols, ornaments, beautiful superfluities; though on this account they cling the more tenaciously to their dignity as war-lords — and need wars on occasion, i.e., exceptional circumstances in which the demo- cratic pressure is interrupted. 39 88 Mixed Opinions etc., § 318. 80 The Wanderer etc., § 276. 87 He comes nearest to positive sympathy with democracy In Human, etc., § 450. 88 Joyful Science, § 176. 80 The Wanderer etc., §281. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 137 Nietzsche even finds advantages in the new regime, in which government does not so much rule the people as become their organ. ' ' Democratic institutions are quarantine stations against the old pest of tyrannical ambitions — as such, very useful and very tedious. ' ' 40 The democratizing of Europe now going on seems to him a link in the chain of those immense prophylactic measures, characteristic of the new time, by which we are mark- ing ourselves off against the Middle Ages. At last we are to get a sure foundation, on which the future can build. We shall make it impossible for fruitful fields of culture to be destroyed in a night by wild and senseless mountain floods, shall put up dams and walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against whatever would subject the bodies or the minds of men. It is crude, rough work at the start, but it will prepare the way for something higher and more spiritual to come — as the gardener has first to protect his field, and then proceeds to plant. Yes, Nietzsche will not judge the workers for democracy too harshly, if for the time being they consider democracy an end, instead of a means. 41 What democracy wants to do is to create and guarantee independence for as many as possible — independence of thought, of manner of life, and of occupation. To this end, however, it must make restrictions — must deny the right to vote on the one hand to the propertyless, on the other to the really rich. These are the two unpermissible classes in the community, for whose removal democracy must continually labor, the one because they are without independence, the other because they threaten it; they and the party system are the three great foes of independence. He is aware that democracy of this character belongs to the future; for present-day democ- racy differs from older forms of government simply in that it drives with new horses — the streets are the old ones, and the vehicles the old ones too. 42 With similar concern for inde- pendence, Nietzsche hopes that the new rulers will not try to rule everywhere, or make standards convenient to the majority binding on all. Some scattering individuals should be allowed to hold aloof from politics, if they will. They should also be forgiven if they do not take the happiness of the many as so supremely important, and become ironical now and then ; their *°Ibid., §289. "Ibid., §275. * 2 Ibid., §293. 138 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER earnestness is in other directions, their ideas of happiness are peculiar, their aim is not one that every hand with five fingers can grasp. Still further, they should be allowed on occasion to break their solitude by speaking to one another (they will be somewhat like men lost in the woods) and encouraging one another, even if they say some things which jar on ears for which they were not intended. 43 Despite all this, Nietzsche thinks it perfectly natural and legitimate that the many should act with a view to their own interests ; it is to be expected that, through the great parliamentary majorities they are likely to obtain, they will attack by progressive taxes the capitalistic, commercial, and speculating classes. Indeed in this way they may gradually bring about a condition of things between the extremes of poverty and wealth, in which socialism will be forgotten. 44 f in Socialism is a combined economic and political problem, and it may be well to note Nietzsche's views at this point in some detail. Anarchists he looks upon as backward and untamed people who will rule hard, if they get the upper hand — they enjoy the sense of power too much; but for socialists he has a certain limited sympathy — he speaks of them as one of the signs of the "coming century." 45 He practically takes the socialist movement as a "rising of those oppressed and held down for centuries against their oppressors." The problem it presents to us practically is not one of right, "how far should we yield to its demands," but one of power, "how far can we utilize them" — just as with a force of nature, steam, for example, which may either be brought into the service of man or may destroy him. To solve the problem, we must know how strong socialism is, and in what modified form it might be used as a lever in the present play of political forces; in certain con- tingencies, it might be a duty to do everything to strengthen it. 46 It will first win rights, when war threatens between the old forces and the new, and prudent calculation on both sides creates the desire for a compact or agreement — for compacts 49 Human, etc., §438. 44 The Wanderer etc., § 292. 43 Dawn of Day, § 184; Werke, XI, 376, § 571. 40 Human, etc., §446. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 139 are the source of all rights [Nietzsche remarks that up to the time of his writing — 1877 apparently — there had been no war or compacts, hence there were no rights or " ought" in the matter]. 47 The movement is, of course, a movement of those interested, but Nietzsche recognizes that it may also be es- poused by persons from other classes animated simply by senti- ments of justice and ready to practise it at their own cost — high-minded (if not just very discerning) representatives of the ruling class might act in this way. 48 For his own part he admits the socialist contention that the present distribution of property is the consequence of number- less injustices and violences; he simply adds that this is only one instance, the old culture in general being built on a basis of force, slavery, deception, and error. He thinks that the unjust disposition lurks everywhere, in the propertyless as well as propertied, and that the needful thing is not violences, but the gradual alteration of men's minds, justice becoming greater and violent instincts weaker on all sides. 49 He considers the remedies of an equal division of property and common owner- ship, and finds them both impracticable. Instead he urges that avenues to small ownership should be kept wide open, and that the acquisition of wealth suddenly and without effort should be prevented. In particular should all branches of transportation and trade which are favorable to the amassing of great wealth — he instances especially banking (Geldhandel) — be taken out of private hands : '°° it comes pretty near to practical socialism.* He even meets by an illuminating explanation an objection often made to socialism, namely, that it overlooks the matter- of-fact inequalities between men. It does so, he says, much as Christianity overlooks differences in human sinfulness — they are too slight to be taken into account: in the total reckoning all are sinful and need salvation. So socialism regards the common nature and powers and needs of men as so much more important than the respects in which they differ, that it de- liberately puts the latter to one side — and in the resolve to ignore differences lies an inspiring force. 51 And yet on the whole Nietzsche is hostile to socialism. The 47 Ibid., § 446. B0 The Wanderer etc., § 285. 48 Ibid., §451. 'MVerfce, XI, 141, §448. 49 Ibid., §452. 140 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER only means of counteracting it which the well-to-do have in their power is, not to provoke it, to live temperately and frugally, to avoid all luxurious display and support the state instead of opposing it when it lays taxes on superfluities and luxuries. If they lack the will to do this, the only difference remaining between them and the socialists is that they possess and the socialists want to — the aims are the same. He gives a scathing description of the lives and pleasures of the present possessing class. 52 The unhappy thing is that the workers are now bent on aping them, are becoming "fellow-conspirators in the present folly of nations, who want before everything else to produce as much and to become as rich as possible. ' ' K Nietz- sche 's ideals are elsewhere, and he does not think too much comfort and wealth and security good for man. If the socialists and worshipers of the state had their way, they might with their measures for making life happy and secure bring Europe to Chinese conditions and a Chinese "happiness," with dis- satisfaction on any great scale and capacity for transformation gone. 54 Ideals of security and comfort are pre-eminently the mark of a commercial age, which wants to have everything easy for trade and the state a sort of arm-chair. 55 He wishes, indeed, a certain measure of comfort and security for the working class, but to make this an absolute ideal, to leave no free, wild spaces in society where risk and danger exist — this, he feels, would be to banish the conditions under which great men and great enterprises arise. 56 To him socialism seems practically identical with a despotic state, in which individuals with indi- vidual instincts and aims appear unjustifiable luxuries, and all are turned into organs of the community — a conception the general form of which we saw him questioning at the end of the last chapter. Minor criticism of socialism I pass over. h The greatest benefit coming from it is, he thinks, the stimulus it gives — it entertains men and brings to the lowest strata a species of practico-philosophical discussion ; so far it is a spring 82 Mixed Opinions etc., §§ 304, 310. 53 Dawn of Day, § 206. 54 Joyful Science, § 24. 50 Dawn of Day, § 174; Werke, XI, 368, §557. 86 So I interpret the second of the eight reflections on socialism in Werke, XI, 142-4; cf. Human, etc., §235. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 141 of power to the mind. 57 But from the theory itself he turns away, and while admitting a social revolution to be not un- likely, he thinks that its result will be less than is expected, since man can do so very much less than he wills (as is shown by the French Revolution). 58 He is thus really at home no- where. While the old aristocratic order is dead, the new com- mercial order is vulgar and tame, nor does the socialist order which may be coming attract him either. He says in sub- stance, "We [he and his kind] are emigres, observers of the ( time, — we wish only to become free of it and understand it, like an eagle flying over it; we have no desire to be citizens or politicians or property-owners, we only want the greatest pos- sible independence; we will be deadly enemies of those of our contemporaries who take refuge in lying and wish reaction; our interest is in individuals and educating them — perhaps humanity will some day have need of them, when the general intoxication of anarchy is past. ' ' 59 IV Yet, ill-moored as he is to the present time and standing for nothing actual, he has certain expectations — at least, there are better possibilities for the future, to which he more than once recurs. As for politics, he would like to see it ordered so that mod- erate intellects might meet its demands, and we should not all have to be continually concerned with it. It is not so great a matter as we sometimes think. We [Germans] rank it so high, because we are deficient in the instincts that make it in the normal man something natural and matter-of-course — we need incitement. 60 He can even imagine an ultimate disap- pearance of the state — as the old unities of the tribe and the family have disappeared. Its functions might be taken over by private individ ials and associations. He admits that it is a different thing to work for such an end : it would be presumptu- ous and show little knowledge of history to break up old soil, 57 Werke, XI, 144. 58 Ibid., XI, 369, §559. Cf. the allusion to the socialist "rat- catchers" and the "mad hopes" they excite (Dawn of Day, §206). 69 Werke XI, 375, § 570. eo Ibid., c ^ ^ 482. 142 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER till new seeds are at hand, and he hopes that the state will last yet a good while, and that destructive attacks on it by hasty, half-educated people will be averted. 61 The reason for his rela- tively low estimate of it is, on the one hand, that the ends it serves (security and comfort) are lesser ends in life, and, on the other, that it none the less wishes to call the highest talents to its aid. Mind ought to be free for other things. "Our age that talks so much of economy is a spendthrift : it wastes what is most precious, mind. " 62 It is the business people particu- larly who want the state, and it is they, with their philosophy, who are ruling the world now — artists, scholars, even religion following in their train. 63 * He gives much attention to war — a state-phenomenon. He knows its uses in the past, is far from absolutely condemning it, admits that it may have uses in the future — there is one apho- rism with the extravagant title, "War Indispensable." 64 It is a remedy, he thinks, for peoples growing languid and miserable — a remedy, that is, supposing that they really want to live — a sort of brutal cure. 65 It is a return to barbarism, but also to barbaric strength, a kind of hibernating time for culture, out of which one issues stronger both for good and for evil. 66 It may also be a good to a commercialized people, too fond of security and ease. 67 On the other hand, a people living full and strong has no need of war. 68 Its effect is to make the victors stupid and the vanquished malicious. 69 The military system not only involves enormous expense, but, what is worse, it takes the strongest, most capable men in extraordinary numbers away from their proper occupations, to make them soldiers. 70 After drawing a vivid detailed picture of the various inequities and stupidities in military life, he sets down the modern military system as an anachronism, a survival, having for the wheels of present-day society only the value of a drag ior brake (i.e., in 61 Human, etc., § 472. 62 Ibid., §481; The Wanderer etc., §232; Dawn of Day, §179. "Werke, XI, 367-9. 64 Human, etc., § 477. 65 The Wanderer etc., § 187. 66 Human, etc., §444; cf. 463. 87 Werlce, XI, 369, § 558. 68 The Wanderer etc., § 187. • 9 Human, etc., § 444. "Ibid., §481; cf. §442. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 143 case a nation is going up or down too fast). 71 He even suggests that a strong victorious people might some day disarm. "Per- haps a great day is coming, when a people distinguished by wars and victories and the highest development of military organization and intelligence, accustomed too to bring the heaviest sacrifices to these objects, will voluntarily proclaim, 'We break the sword' — and allow its whole military system down to the last foundations to fall in ruins. To disarm whilst most capable of arms, from an elevation of sentiment — that is the way to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition for peace; while the so-called armed peace, such as we find in all lands now, rests on warlikeness of disposition, which trusts neither itself nor its neighbor, and half from hate, half from fear, refuses to lay its weapons down. Better perish than hate and fear, and twice better perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day be the supreme maxim of every individual political society. ' ' 72 Yes, Nietzsche goes still further. He is aware that, as I have said, war is a state-phenomenon, and that the continued possibility of it in Europe is bound up with the system of sep- arate states which exist there, 73 and he deliberately sets himself against the nationalist spirit (or spirits), which has grown ever stronger since the reaction against Napoleon, and calls for a federation of European peoples, a "united Europe." It is interesting to note that his first thought of such a consumma- tion was as a result of the democratizing process now so gen- erally going on. He makes a notable forecast along this line, which I may summarize as follows: The practical outcome of the spreading democratic tendency will be a European federa- tion of peoples. Each people will be like a canton with its own separate rights. Boundaries between cantons will be determined largely by geographical considerations. The historical mem- ories of the various peoples will not be taken greatly into account, for the innovating and experimental spirit of democ- racy tends to uproot sentiments of this description ; while corrections of boundaries that may be necessary will be carried out so as to serve the interests of the large cantons and of the whole federation, they will not be in deference to recollections 71 The Wanderer etc., § 279. 72 Ibid., § 284. 7S Cf. Human, etc., § 615. 144 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER of any hoary past. To find suitable points of view for the corrections will be the task of future diplomats, who will need to be at once adepts in the history of culture, agriculturists, and trade experts, and they will have not armies, but reasons and practical utilities to back them. 74 Some breaks with the past being inevitable, there will be plaints for lost national traits (in dress, customs, legal conceptions, dialects, forms of poetry), but we must not lend too much ear to them. It is the price that has to be paid for rising to the super-national, to universal goals of mankind, yes to a real knowledge and com- prehension and enjoyment of other pasts than one's own (des nicht Einheimischen) — in a word, for ceasing to be barbarian. 75 Crude patriotism, such as the Romans had, is now, when quite other and higher tasks than patria and honor await us, either a dishonest thing or else a sign of arrested development (Zuruck- gebliebenheit) , 76 National differences are, much more than is commonly realized, differences in stages of culture, not anything permanent, so that there is little obligation to argue from national character for one who is trying to recreate convictions, i.e., to elevate culture. If, for example, one thinks of all that has been German, the theoretic question, What is German? gets at once the corrected shape, "What is German now?" — and every good German will answer it practically just by over- coming some of his German qualities. When a people goes forward and grows, it breaks the girdle that gave it hitherto its national appearance; if it stays as it was, becomes stunted, a new girdle fastens itself around its soul — the ever hardening crust becomes as it were a prison, whose walls ever grow. Has then a people very much that is fixed, it is a proof that it is ready to petrify and become a monument — as was the case at a certain point of time with ancient Egypt. "Hence he who wishes well to the Germans will for his part see to it, that he ever more and more grows out beyond what is German. Turning to the un-German has ever been the distinguishing mark of the strong (Tuchtigen) among us." Nietzsche entitles this para- graph " To be a good German means to un-Germanize oneself. ' ' 77 74 The Wanderer etc., § 292. 75 Werke, XI, 133-4, § 423. 76 Human, etc., § 442. 71 Mixed Opinions etc., §323; cf. Werke, XIII, 337, §836. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 145 He thinks that already modern tendencies — commerce and indus- try, the interchange of books and letters, the common features in all higher culture, the easy changing of abode — are weaken- ing nations and tending in the direction of a European man. 3 ' Not the interest of the many, as is often said, but above all the interests of certain princely dynasties, and then of certain commercial and social classes, push in the nationalist direction. 78 Taking this larger view, Nietzsche finds the Catholic church suggestive, i.e., the catholicity of it, particularly when it was a sovereign and super-national power in the Middle Ages and made states and nations look petty in comparison ! The church met fictitious needs, it is true, but some day there may be equally universal institutes to meet man's real needs. 79 He boldly anticipates "the united states of Europe," holding that while the uniting of the various German governments in one state was a "great idea," this is a still "greater idea." 80 He even broaches the idea of an international ministry of educa- tion, which should consider the intellectual welfare of the entire human race, independently of national interests. 81 Europe has a lofty dignity, in his eyes: its task, once united, will be to guide and watch over the development of the entire earth. 82 In this connection an extraordinary suggestion is thrown out that a medical geography of the globe be made, so that, as a physician sends his patients to this and that climate or par- ticular environment for the cure of their varying ailments, so ailing peoples and families may be gradually taken to zones and circumstances favorable to them till their infirmities are overcome — the whole earth becoming thus in time a set of health-stations. 83 One may skeptically ask who is to be the physician for so great a task, and to this Nietzsche gives no formal answer, but may be presumed to have in mind some such organization of the accumulated science and wisdom of mankind as a "united Europe" might effect. Continuing these large prospects, he speaks of an "economy of the earth," of letting poorer races die out and training better ones, of one language — in general, of entirely new conditions for human 78 Human, etc., §475. 81 Ibid., XI, 147-8, §460. 79 Ibid., §476. 82 The Wanderer etc., §87. eo Werke, XI, 138, §439. ** Ibid., §188. 146 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER development, particularly for the development of beings of a higher type. 81 He thinks that by the conquest of nature more force may be won than is actually needed, and then something of the luxurious might come among men, of which we have no idea now; great projects would be feasible of which we do not dream. "Aerial navigation alone throws all our old cul- tural conceptions aside" [he might have added, "undersea navigation," had he lived now]. Instead of our usual works of art, we might try to beautify nature on a great scale by means of labor extending over centuries — for example, bring to perfection suggestions and motives of beauty in the Alps. We might have an architecture, in which we should build for eternity, as the Romans did. We might utilize the backward peoples of Asia, Africa, and elsewhere as laborers. 85 Cyclopic work has been done by other forces in the past; the day of science is to come. 86 k For progress Nietzsche finds an advantage in the free- thinking habits of mind which have arisen in recent times (though he distinguishes free-thinking from what is popularly known as "free-thought"). Prehistoric ages were determined during immeasurable stretches of time by custom, nothing hap- pening ; in the historic period the matter of moment has always been some departure from custom, some disagreement of opinion: it is free action of the mind (die Freigeisterei) that makes history. 87 There is corresponding significance in the dis- solution of old religious traditions now going on. We are ready to experiment, to take things into our own hands. Our courage rises as we have need of it, and if we fail or err, we believe that it is our own affair — "God," as one to whom we are accountable for mistakes, and "immortal souls," with which we are to pay penalties, have disappeared. 88 And yet, Nietzsche urges, we should be at our work betimes. The aim he proposes few will question the greatness of — he speaks of it as an "ecumenical" one, embracing the whole inhabited globe; 89 he 84 Werke, XI, 139, §441. 80 Ibid., XI, 376-7, § 572. 80 Joyful Science, §7. 87 Werke, XI, 138, § 440. 88 Cf. Mixed Opinions etc., § 179; Dawn of Day, §501. 89 Mixed Opinions etc., § 179. Cf. the striking paragraph on mankind as a tree which is to overshadow the earth, The Wanderer etc., § 189. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS 147 reminds us, however, that while time is long, propitious time is not necessarily so. We cannot assume that mankind will always be able to go on in the higher direction. Things do not improve by instinct or any divine destiny. There may be movement down as well as up, and mankind at the end of its career may be on a lower level than it is now. With the downfall of Roman culture and the spread of Christianity, man became increasingly unsightly within the Empire; and human-kind in general, as it has come up from the ape, may at last go down to it. 90 The race may be nearer the heights possible to it in the middle of its journey than at the close — the end of a melody is not its goal, the end of a man's life (above all when it is in weakness) is not its goal. 91 Therefore let us compass the utmost possible now — the chance may not come again. Nietzsche has certain anticipations even in the religious field — if religion may be taken broadly to cover any kind of a cultus of ideal things. "A Vision" is the title of one aphorism, which reads as follows: "Lectures and hours for meditation set apart for adults, mature and maturest, and these daily, uncompulsory, but visited by every one from force of custom; churches, as the places worthiest and richest in memories, to be used for this purpose; almost daily festivals in honor of the attained or attainable dignity of human reason; a new and fuller blossom- ing of the ideal of the teacher, in which clergyman, artist, physician, scholar, and wise man, blend in one . . . this is my vision, which ever comes back to me, and about which I firmly believe that it has lifted a corner of the future's veil." 92 He expresses the desire for a new style of architecture which shall more worthily, more fittingly express the serious ideas of men today — still, ample spaces, where no sound of traffic is heard and a finer decency even forbids praying aloud to the priest, where one can think and for a few moments be by oneself. 93 But the religious suggestions of Nietzsche I must practically leave out of account in the present volume. 94 90 Human, etc., § 247. 91 Ibid., §234; The Wanderer etc., §204; Dawn of Day, §349. 62 Mixed Opinions etc., § 180. 88 Joyful Science, § 280. 8 *As to a "religion of the future," see Werhe, XI, 327, §439; 373, § 569; 376, § 571; Dawn of Day, §§ 96, 164. THIRD PERIOD CHAPTER XIII GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD, AND VIEW OF THE WORLD In the spring of 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship at Basel. Already — some three years earlier — he had been obliged to give up his work at the Padagogium there. There were intervals of exuberant animal spirits, but as a whole his life appears to have been one of suffering. He was not teaching to his satisfaction — he confesses this in his letter of resigna- tion. 1 Moreover, the thought came over him at times that his strength, supposing that he could turn it to account, lay in writing rather than in teaching — in any case that he was coming to have views of his own and that he ought to be developing them. Questions of this sort had disturbed his academic serenity before. Twice — in 1874 and even as early as 1870 — he had been tenkpted to renounce his university work : his free time was too little, and he could not say his best ' ' to the boys. ' ' 2 But now a grave illness precipitated matters, and he definitively put an end to his teaching career. The University granted him a pen- sion of 3,000 francs a year, and with this and a little income of his own (the whole amounting to around $1,000.00) he began that entirely private life as a thinker which ended with his apoplectic stroke ten years later. The intervening years were spent mostly in the south of Europe — as stated in the opening chapter. It was a lonely existence for the most part ; he sorely missed the presence and sympathy of friends. Indeed, he had already lost many of his early friends, so unusual was the course his thinking had taken. He found refuge with books 1 See Werke (pocket ed.), IV, ix, x. * See Richter, op. cit., pp. 57-9; Ziegler, op. cit., p. 79. 148 GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 149 and with solitary nature — and, I might add, with people in the humbler walks of life ; his sister remarks that in Genoa during the winter of 1880 and 1881 he perhaps first came to know the common people, finding much that was lovable in them, and they showing a kind of affectionate reverence for him. 3 Some- thing in his manner of life at this time is hinted at in a private memorandum. His ideal, he says, is "an independence that does not offend the eye, a softened and veiled pride, one that equalizes things with others (sich dbzahlt an die Anderen) by not competing for their honors and enjoyments, and not mind- ing ridicule. This shall ennoble my habits of life : to be never common and always courteous, not to be covetous, but to strive quietly and keep in the upper air ; to be frugal, even niggardly toward myself, but unexacting (milde) toward others. Light sleep, a free quiet step, no alcohol, no princes or other nota- bilities, no women or newspapers, no honors, no intercourse except with the highest spirits and now and then with the common people — this is as indispensable as the sight of vigor- ous and healthy vegetation — foods easiest had, which do not take one into the press of greedy and smacking crowds, if possible self-prepared foods, or those not needing prepara- tion." 4a At least six or seven of these years belong to the third period of Nietzsche 's life — though fixing a date for its beginning is a more or less arbitrary thing. Some scholars put Dawn of Day (1881) and Joyful Science (1882) into it, others class these works with those of the second period, while still others — and with probably the greatest show of reason — think that they mark the transition from one period to the other. The fact is that there is no break, no catastrophic change, such as occurred in 1876. All we can truthfully say is that gradually the tone becomes more positive, that, while criticism continues or is even sharper than ever, constructive thinking appears more and more, and an approach to a comprehensive world-view. The books unquestionably belonging to this period include the two which are the best known, or rather most quoted, of all of Nietzsche's works, Thus spake Zarathustra (1883-5) and Beyond Good and Evil (1885-6) ; also Towards the Genealogy *Werke (pocket ed.), V, xvi. * Werke, XI, 390, §613. 150 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER of Morals* (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), The Anti- christian* (1888), "The Case of Wagner" and "Nietzsche contra Wagner" (both 1888, and little more than pamphlets). Besides these, are the autobiographical notes (not originally meant for publication) entitled Ecce Homo, and voluminous material for a contemplated and never achieved systematic work, Will to Power — material which has been more or less successfully put together by later hands and now appears under that title (second and much improved edition, 1906). There are also three posthumous volumes of private notes and unfin- ished sketches. 7 ii The most general mark of the period is confidence — one might say, joy: the book which may be taken as a herald of it is entitled Joyful Science (Die frohliche Wissenschaft) . 8 Nietzsche is now quite emerging from the gloom and depression that had ensued on the overthrow of his first ideals. He had momentarily lost his goal ; he is now sure of one. He needed a cure from his early romanticism, he had had too much sweet, too rich a diet; but he has got it — and is well again (in soul, at least). 9 Chastened, disciplined, he feels once more ready for battle. As our fathers, he says, brought sacrifices of wealth 5 The German title is " Zur Genealogie der Moral" the " Zur " indi- cating that Nietzsche pretends to nothing more than contributions to the subject. 6 The German title, " Der Antichrist," is commonly translated, in questionable fashion, " The Antichrist." The German " der Christ " does not usually signify "Christ," but "the Christian'" (" Christus" is the word for Christ), and " der Antichrist" is naturally (if not necessarily) "The Antichristian." In translating as I do I am happy to find myself following the best French authority on Nietzsche, Henri Lichtenberger, who renders " L'Antichretien." The late R. M. Meyer, perhaps the best all-round authority on Nietzsche in Germany, thought that while Nietzsche played with the double meaning of the word, Lichtenberger's translation was the correct one (this in a private letter to the writer). T These are Vols. XII, XIII, XIV of the German octavo edition. A small part of this material is given at the end of Vols. VII and VIII of the German pocket edition; in the English translation it is almost entirely lacking, as is also the greater part of the posthumous Vols. IX, X, and XI of the German octavo edition, covering Nietzsche's first and second periods. 8 Cf. Joyful Science, §324, beginning "No! Life has not deceived me! " 8 Preface, § 1, to Joyful Science. Cf. preface (of 1886), § 2, to Mixed Opinions etc., where this book, along with Human, etc., and The Wan- derer etc., is spoken of as his " anti-romantic self-treatment." GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 151 and blood, rank and country to Christianity, so will we sacrifice, not for our doubts or unbelief, but for our faith. 10 Nietzsche once said, in referring to Human, All-too-Human, "It is necessary to take up this whole positivism into myself, and none the less be a bearer of idealism. ' ' ll By positivism he means positive knowledge, i.e., the attitude which insists on actual facts, as distinguished from fancies and speculations. We have seen something of his passion for verity in the previous period, his wish to face facts, however bare, comfortless, or empty of higher significance they might be; and we are not to imagine that he ever becomes an uncritical idealist again — he has no lapses such as are common among those who become tired of doubt; in Dawn of Day, with his face setting in the new direction, he speaks of " idealizing " as reprovingly as ever he had when his positivistic attitude was at its height. 12 And yet this attitude takes now a secondary place, for he feels that it is not equal to the whole of life. Philosophy is to his mind something more than science, or even criticism and critical science, counter as this view was to the prevailing opinion in his day. He advances a variety of considerations at different times and in different connections — I state them here in my own order. In the first place, certain knowledge is not always to be had, and in action we have often to go on chances and possibilities — indeed there is a certain weakness in always want- ing to know, in not being ready for risks. 13 Secondly, facts of themselves are miscellaneous, scattering — it is really a bric-a- brac of conceptions that so-called positivism is bringing to market today; they need to be interpreted, related, put in order. 14 The special sciences cannot make themselves inde- pendent of philosophy, which is a general view from a height above them, involving an "TJeberblick, TJmblick, Niederblick." ^ Philosophers have usually been against their time, and now there is a duty incumbent on them to oppose the tendency to 10 Joyful Science, § 377. 11 1 rely here upon Riehl (op. cit., p. 184), who cites Werke, XI, 499 (presumably the first edition, which is not accessible to me). There is something similar in Werke, XIV, 351, §211. 12 Cf. §§299, 427. 1S Joyful Science, §§ 347, 375. 14 Beyond Oood and Evil, § 10. 18 Ibid., §§204-5. 152 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER put every one into a corner and speciality. "What I wish is that the genuine concept of the philosopher shall not entirely perish in Germany. ' ' 16 b Nietzsche even goes to the length of questioning whether there are any bare facts separable from interpretation of some kind, whether it is possible, as some pro- pose, to stand by the facts simply and not go beyond them — he does not think much of the idea of putting philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis." 17 Moreover, facts have to be valued as well as ascertained — and it appears to be his opinion that the ultimate canon for interpreting, relating, and ordering is derived from the valuing process. The valuing attitude is sharply contrasted with the "scientific" one. It is not a mere mirroring of the facts, and Nietzsche draws a satirical picture of the "objective" man who mirrors everything and is nothing — presque rien. 18 It involves choosing, preferring, judging of facts — that is, a standard which is independent of them and is projected by the mind. Zara- thustra accordingly is represented as having left the house of scholars who only want to observe; the present age seems to him one of polyglot knowledge, not one of belief and creative capacity. 19 This prostrating oneself before facts, without stand- ards by which to judge of them, has become a sort of cultus — Nietzsche admits that Taine is an example of it. 20 The only explanation of it is that men have been long happy" in the unreal and are now surfeited with it. 21 Positivism is a rebound against Romanticism, the work of undeceived romanticists. 22 But to love the real, irrespective of its quality and character, is to be tasteless. Zarathustra does not like those to whom each and every thing is good and this world the best world — he honors rather refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs that have learned to say " I, " and " Yes " and " No. " » The trouble with 10 Ibid., §212; Will to Power, §420. 11 Will to Power, § 477; Genealogy etc., Ill, § 24. 18 Beyond Good and Evil, § 207. 18 Thus spake Zarathustra, II, xvi, xiv. 20 Will to Power, §422. I say "admits," because Taine was one of the first to give Nietzsche recognition, and Nietzsche did not forget it. 21 Dawn of Day, § 244. 22 Werke, XIV, 341, § 194. 28 Zarathustra, III, xi, § 2 (I am reminded of an inscription I saw- on the lintel of a house in the Via del Campo, Genoa, Non omnia sed bona et bene ) . GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 153 our science today is its ideallessness, its lack of a great love. 24 For it is man's task to set himself an end, and thereby a standard of value — above all is this the task of man at his highest, of the philosopher. The sciences are preliminary and preparatory to this supreme functioning — the solving the problem of value, the determining the order of precedence in values. 25 Genuine philosophers say, "So should things be" — they are com- manders and legislators; they determine the Whither? and For what? of man, laying creative hands on the future, and turning all that is or was into means and instrument. Nietzsche puts it boldly, "Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is — will to power."™ That is (stating the matter in my own language), we human beings can observe, but we can also strive for that which is past all observ- ing, since it is the projection of our minds and imagination, and belongs as yet among the viewless and, strictly speaking, non-existent things of the world. We can look at existence, whether ourselves or reality outside us, as so much matter, v\rf 9 on which we are to impress a higher form. Science at its best is necessarily fragmentary — and equally so is history; if we limit ourselves to their report of things, we leave out the whole area of possibility. To quote Nietzsche's own words: "Man is something fluid and plastic — we can make out of him what we will." 27 Again, "In man is creature and creator in one: there is matter, fragment, superfluity, clay, excrement, unreason,, chaos — but also creator, former, the hardness of the hammer,. the contemplativeness of a God, and the glory of the seventh day." 28 Instead of Schopenhauer's doctrine of redemption from existence, Zarathustra (Nietzsche) gives us a doctrine of the re-creation of existence. Every fragmentary "it was" is to be changed into a "so I would have it": 29 the doctrine rests on a belief in the changeability of the world and in the power of men to make change. Accordingly we feel — not always, but as a rule — an atmos- 24 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 23. 20 Note at end of Genealogy etc., I. 20 Beyond Good and Evil, §211. 27 Werke, XII, 362, § 690. 28 Beyond Good and Evil, § 225. 29 Zarathustra, II, xx; III, xii, §3. 154 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER phere of great faith in this last period. We know our powers, he says, not our power — we should regard ourselves as a vari- able quantity whose capacity of performance might be of the highest under favorable circumstances. 30 " Raphael without hands/' i.e., genius without the happy conditions that lend it power to execute, — may it not be the rule rather than the exception? The world — particularly the human world 31 — is a bottomless rich sea. Things which have been long weak and embryonic may at last come to light; unconscious possibilities in fathers may stand revealed in their children or children's children — we all have hidden gardens and plantations within us, or, to use another metaphor, are volcanoes which may some day have an hour of eruption ; 32 even in the souls of Germans, " these poor bears,' 1 lurk ''hidden nymphs and wood-gods" and "still higher divinities." 33 Nietzsche is as far as ever from de- riving our higher powers or qualities (after the manner of Kant or Schopenhauer) from a metaphysical source • but they are real all the same — he once speaks of the hero who is hidden in every man, and he can imagine transgressors giving themselves up to justice. 34 Though our unrealized possibilities are a chaos rather than a cosmos, a kind of milky way or labyrinth, 35 his faith is plainly that order, suns and stars, may come out of them. If man is sicklier and more uncertain than any other animal, it is just because he makes so many changes — because of the unde- fined range of his possibilities. He the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, who enters the lists for the last supremacy with animals, nature, and Gods; he the still uncon- quered, the eternally expectant, whose own inner force urges him on and gives him no rest — how could he not be liable to maladies such as nothing else in nature knows? 36 We know what is or was, not what may be or might have been. Nietzsche touches on Plato's reforming thoughts and attempts to carry them into effect in Sicily — he thinks it conceivable that he should have succeeded, even as the legislation of Mohammed went into effect among his Arabs, and the still stranger thoughts of Christianity prevailed in another quarter: a few 80 Dawn of Day, § 326. S4 Ibid., § 78; Dawn of Day, § 322. 31 Zarathustra, IV, i. 35 Joyful Science, § 322. 82 Joyful Science, § 9. 80 Genealogy etc., Ill, § 13. 80 Ibid., § 105. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD 155 accidents less and a few accidents more, and there might have been a Platonizing of Southern Europe — though as things turned out, Plato has come to be known as a fantast and Utopian (harder names perhaps having been used in ancient Athens). 37 Naturally along with the larger outlook is a fresh apprecia- tion of poetry. He thinks that poets might do more than paint an Arcady, nor should it be necessary for them to employ their imagination in falsifying reality; it is their high mission to open to us the realm of the possible. Starting with suggestions from the course of evolution in the past, they might with bold fantasy anticipate what will or may be — picture virtues such as have never been on earth, and higher races of men. "All our poetry is so restricted, earthly (kleinhurgerlich-erden- haft)." He waits for seers who will tell us of the possible, astronomers of the ideal who will reveal to us purple-glowing constellations and whole milky ways of the beautiful. First after the death of religion [in the old sense] can invention in the realm of the Divine again luxuriate — and perhaps just because we can no longer flee to God, the sea within ourselves may rise higher. 38 He knows the charm, too, of poets who but imperfectly express the vision of their souls, who give us fore- tastes of the vision rather than the vision itself : 39 it is the charm of suggestiveness — a very different charm and a much whole- somer one than that upon which George Eliot dilates in "A Minor Prophet," where imperfection becomes almost dear for its own sake. To sum up: if science, knowledge of the actual whatever becomes of ideals, may be taken as the characteristic note of the second period, science and the ideal are the note of the third. Close observation of reality and an unblanched face before it continue, but there is a fresh sense that the actual is only a part of the totality of things. Science is simply a negative test — we must not have ideals which are inconsistent with it. 40 Accord- ingly Nietzsche is happy again — but with an ennobled, purified 87 Dawn of Day, § 496. "Ibid., §551; Werke, XI, 328, §440; Joyful Science, §285 (cf. Zarathustra, IV, xiii, § 2 ) . 89 Joyful Science, § 79. 40 This is the general standpoint, though he says that science " has nothing against a new ideal" (Werke, XI, 376, §571). 156 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER happiness. Frau Andreas-Salome thinks that the land of his future expectations was not really a new one, but the old one from which he originally set out — and in a deep sense this is true; but she admits that the products of the new period were more or less shaped by the experiences of the intervening years. il Certain great perspectives of the spiritual and moral horizon tire my strongest springs of life," he wrote her, after referring to the fearful existence of renunciation he had been obliged to lead. "I also have morning-dawns . . . what I no longer be- lieved . . . appears now possible — as the golden morning dawn on the horizon of all my future life. ' ' 41 in Though the general outlines of the world are much the same to Nietzsche as in the preceding period, conceptions of possi- bility and change and man's power play, as just intimated, an ever larger part. One might almost say that he becomes optimist. He had earlier said, "Away with the wearisomely hackneyed terms, optimism and pessimism ! ' ' He maintained that they stood for theological contentions, and that no one cared any longer for the theologians — except the theologians themselves. Good and bad have only human references — the world itself is neither good nor bad (not to say best and worst), and we should stop both glorifying it and reviling it in this way. 42 But favorable or unfavorable judgments of the world may be based on other grounds, and he inclines more and more to a favorable judg- ment. The world comes to seem good to him just as it is, without any intrinsic order, or inherent purpose, or moral gov- ernance — good, that is, as a place one is willing and glad to live in. 43 Indeed, he approximates to religious feeling about it — at least he uses religious language. His mouthpiece, Zarathustra, says, "To blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.' ' ** Even change and accident are regarded with a semi- religious veneration. All becoming is to Zarathustra a "dance of Gods," a "wantonness of Gods." 45 The earth is likened to 41 Lou Andreas-Salome, op. cit., pp. 136-8. 42 Human, etc., § 28. 49 See the condemnation of pessimism in Dawn of Day, §§329, 561; Joyful Science, §§ 134, 357; Will to Power, § 701. 4 * Zarathustra, prologue, § 3. 45 Ibid., Ill, xii, § 2. VIEW OF THE WORLD 157 a dice-table — one which Gods have spread out, and on which they play with men; it trembles from the throws they make and their creative new words. 46 We hear of the " heaven of accident " standing over all things — and to teach that accident has so high and ruling a place in the world is not to revile, but to bless. 47 In The Antichristian, after saying that indignation at the general aspect of things is, along with pessimism, the privilege of the Tschandala [the lowest class of men 48 ] , Nietzsche uses this remarkable language : "The world is perfect — so speaks the instinct of the most spiritual men, the affirmative instinct — ■ imperfection, what lies beneath us of every kind, distance, the pathos of distance, the Tschandala himself belongs to this per- fection." 49 This does not mean that Nietzsche has altered in the slightest his estimate of things from a moral standpoint — that he is not still pessimist, as most would understand that term. "We are seethed," he says, "in the view, and have become cold and hard in it, that things do not go on at all divinely in the world, or even according to human measure rationally, mercifully, or justly; we know it, the world in which we live, is undivine, unmoral, 'unhuman' " — that it is not valuable in the way we have believed is the surest result we have. 50 Injury, violence, stealing, killing inhere in all life. 51 He honors Schopenhauer (in contrast with men like Schiller, W. von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Schelling) for seeing the world as it is, and the deviltry of it. 52 He feels himself an heir of the veracity and old-fashioned piety of Luther, who recognized that reason could not of itself make out a just and merciful govern- ment of the world, and of Kant, who saw that morality could not be based on nature and history, since immorality ruled there ; 53 d both, that is, had to put the Divine outside the world (a logic which our new "immanent" theologians might well ponder over). But, he in effect argues, because we are pes- i6 Ibid., Ill, xvi, §3. 47 Ibid., Ill, iv. 48 For a more exact meaning of the Hindu term, see later, p. 453. 49 The Antickristian, §57; cf. Zarathustra, IV, x; Will to Power, §§ 1031, 1033. 60 Joyful Science, § 346. 01 Zarathustra, III, xii, §10; Genealogy etc., II, §11. 62 Dawn of Day, § 190. 63 Preface, §§3, 4, to Dawn of Day. 158 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER simists in this sense, because the world has not the particular value commonly ascribed to it, it does not follow that it is less valuable — it may be more so. For what are the standards of value which are commonly set up? what is it that is deified? Goodness, justice, love. But what are goodness, justice, love but qualities by the help of which men get along together in societies, necessary rules for their association in flocks? What are we doing then but taking certain utilities of flock-life and making a God of them, an absolute standard by which the world is judged, so that it is good if it conforms to them and bad if it does not. 54 It seems a presumptuous thing to Nietzsche, an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason — indeed he finds something laughable in man's proposing to invent values that are to exceed the value of the actual world. 55 How the world is still valuable in his eyes after the downfall of moralistic faith, we have already seen in part and shall see more clearly later on. I may only say in general now that it is the possible outcome of existence, which justifies existence to his mind — the type or types of life that may emerge. It is not that pleasure may preponderate over pain — to considerations of pleasure and pain he gives a quite secondary place. Every sound individual, he thinks, refuses to judge life by these incidents. Pain might preponderate, and there be none the less a mighty will to life, a saying yes to it, a feeling even of the necessity of this preponderance. 56 A measure of the will's power is its capacity to endure opposition, pain, and torture, and to turn them to advantage. With this in mind, he says, "I do not reckon the evil and painful character of existence an objection to it, but hope that it will sometime be more evil and more painful than heretofore." 57 He despises the "pes- simism of sensibility" and calls it "a sign of deep impoverish- ment of life" ; 58 more than once he quotes Voltaire's lines, u Un monstre gai vaut mieux Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux." ** He thus departs widely from Spencerian and all hedonistic measurements of the worth of life. When we come into the 54 Will to Power, § 32. ,T Ibid., § 382. 65 Joyful Science, § 34G. * s Ibid., §§701, 707. 58 Will to Power, § 35. •• Ibid., §§35, 91. VIEW OF THE WORLD 159 region and atmosphere of his thoughts, it is like passing into a new zone and climate. If we still call his view pessimism, we must admit that it is, to use his own phrase, "Dionysiac pessimism," one that affirms life despite or even because of suffering and change and death, and so practically as good as optimism — one might say better than the soft sweet thing which often goes by that name. He speaks of Dionysiac pessimism as his proprium and ipsissimum.™ e If nature, in her ceaseless flow of change and accident, gives a chance for greatness, it is to him enough. 61 IV Some details in his picture of the world may now be given, though they are not absolutely new. (1) Let us guard, he says, against conceiving of the world as a living or organic thing. Toward what should it develope ? From what should it be nour- ished ? How could it grow and increase ? Living organic things are simply phenomena in it — and late and rare phenomena. (2) Nor should we regard it as a machine — a machine is some- thing constructed for an end, and the world has no marks of being constructed in this way; we really do it too much honor in speaking of it as a machine. (3) We should guard against assuming that the regular cyclic movements of our and neighbor- ing planets are everywhere — there may be much ruder and more contradictory movements, our astral order being an exception, and chaos marking the world as a whole (chaos in the sense of an absence, not of necessity, but of order, organization, form, beauty). (4) There is no occasion for blaming or praising the world. We should avoid ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason or the opposite. It is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, and has no wish to be — it does not at all strive to imitate man and none of our aesthetic or moral judgments hit it. It has not even an impulse of self-preservation, or impulses of any kind. (5) It also knows no laws. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature — there are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Moreover, since there are no ends in nature, there is strictly speaking no accident; only in 60 Joyful Science, § 370. 61 Cf. Daion of Day, § 191. 160 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER a world of ends has the word "accident" a meaning. (6) Let ns be on our guard against making death the antithesis of life — the living is only a species of the dead, and a rare species. (7) Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates new things (it is really a finite quantity, and sooner or later reaches the limits of its power). 62 Moreover, it is im- portant to stop speaking of the All as if it were a unity, a force, an absolute of some kind — we easily come in this way to take it as a highest instance and to christen it "God." We must split up the All, unlearn any particular respect for it, bring back feelings we have given to the unknown and the whole, and devote them to things next us, our own things. The All raises ever the old problems, ' ' How is evil possible ? ' ' and so on. To speak bluntly, there is no All, the great sensorium or inven- torium or storehouse of power is lacking. 63 Nietzsche is thus altogether a pluralist. Such unities as we find are, to him, derived and created things, and lie in a larger sea of the chaotic. This is true not only of the world at large, but of an individual soul. Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic paths are not the deepest; he who looks into the vast space within himself and is aware of the milky ways there, knows also how irregular all milky ways are — they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence. 64 Nietzsche is accordingly distrust- ful of systematizers, and he conjectures their descent from registrars and office-secretaries, whose business it was to label things and put them in their pigeonholes. 65 "He is a thinker: that means that he understands how to take things more simply than they are." 66 Particularly now, when science is just be- ginning its work, does system-building seem to him childish- ness. "I am not narrow enough for a system — and not even for my system. " w f But though Nietzsche regards the world as a more or less chaotic, irregular thing, 68 he avoids, as already stated, thinking ''Joyful Science, § 109; cf. Werke, XII, 58-9. 63 Will to Power, § 331. •* Joyful Science, § 322. "Dawn of Day, §318; Joyful Science, §348; cf. Twilight of the Idols, I, §26; and what his sister says, Werke (pocket ed.), IX, xviii. 6 s Joyful Science, § 189. • 7 Werke, XIV, 413, §292; 354, §217. e * Cf. Joyful Science, §§277, 322; Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii {chaos sive natura) ; Will to Power, § 711. VIEW OF THE WORLD 161 of it as infinite, whether in extent or power — such a view seems to him an unwarranted extravagance. Though immense and practically immeasurable, it is none the less a definite quantity, something capable neither of increase nor of diminution, sur- rounded by nothing, for there is nothing outside of it, terms of this sort being applicable only to relations within it and empty space being but a name. 69 In no way does he more radically depart from modern, romantic, Christian notions and return to old Greek habits of thought, than in this view of a finite rather than infinite world. As Zarathustra sees it in a dream, the world is something measurable, weighable, corn- passable, divinable — not, indeed, simple enough to put men's minds to sleep, and yet not enigmatic enough to scare away human love, a kind of humanly good thing, like a perfect apple, or a broad-boughed tree, or a treasure-box open for the delight of modest revering eyes. 70 It is, indeed, of such measured scope that the things which once happened in it are likely, or even bound in the course of time, to happen again — there cannot be ever new things. Sometime the possibilities of change will be exhausted, and then the new things will be old things over again. This becomes a special doctrine which we shall consider in the next chapter. Suffice it now to say that by this recur- rence, and, supposing that time goes on forever, ever renewed recurrence of the past, a semblance of succession or order arises in the world, despite its chance nature — or rather just because of this, for the recurrence is entirely a matter of accident and necessity, not the result of any design or ordering will. Nietzsche's attitude to chaos and accident is a double one. Because of what may 'come out of it, and partly because it represents the actual conditions of existence which a brave man will accept anyway, he speaks at times of "beautiful chaos," "dear accident." In this mood amor fati is his motto. He writes on the opening of a new year, "I will ever more learn to recognize the necessary in things as the beautiful, — so shall I be one of those who make things beautiful: let this be from now on my love!" 71 Zarathustra calls (by a play on words 86 Werke, XII, 52, §§ 91-2; Will to Power, § 1067. T0 Zarathustra, III, x, § 1. T1 Joyful Science, §§276-7. 162 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER which it is impossible to give the effect of in English) "von Ohngefahr," literally "by chance/' the oldest nobility in the world, and says that the heaven above him is so pure and high, just because there is no spider or spider-web of reason there, because it is a dancing-ground for divine accidents, a divine table for divine dice and dice-players. 72 And yet we are not to infer that Nietzsche reveres chance or accident for itself, and sometimes we find him describing it as a giant to be fought. 73 So far as man is concerned, it is at best an oppor- tunity, a situation from which something may be wrested. He speaks of compelling accidents to dance in measure like the stars. 74 He instances the way in which a master of musical improvising will, if he strikes an accidental note, turn it to account — fitting it into the thematic framework and giving it a beautiful meaning and soul. 75 He represents Zarathustra as superior to chance: the prophet uses it, boils it in his pot — indeed, only in this way does it become his eatable meat. 76g Nietzsche is perfectly aware that those who do not know how to use chance, may find in it their undoing. T2 Zarathustra, III, iv. TB Joyful Science, § 303. TS Ibid., I, xxii, § 2. ,e Zarathustra, III, v, § 3. ■"Ibid., Ill, xvi, §3. CHAPTER XIV THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE Allusion was made in the preceding chapter to the idea of recurrence as a part of Nietzsche's general view of the world; I shall now treat it with some particularity. 1 It is sometimes regarded as fanciful or mystical. Professor Ziegler calls it "a phantastic hypothesis. ' ' 2 Professor Riehl relegates it to the childhood of science — it cannot be proved or even made proba- ble. 3 A distinguished German physician and psychiatrist even thinks that when a conceit, which might have been pardonable in the times of Pythagoras, unhinges a man who has read Kant, something is the matter with him. 4 Professor Pringle-Pattison can only say, "So long as it remained a real possibility which might be established on scientific grounds, it haunted him like a nightmare ; so soon as it receded into the realm of specu- lative fantasy, he began hymns to eternity as to a bride, and to the marriage ring of recurrence ' ' 5 — that is, he was attracted to it in inverse proportion to its scientific character. Even Dr. Dolson speaks of this " half -mystic doctrine." 6 It must be ad- mitted that Nietzsche is himself partly responsible for views of this sort. He once speaks of the idea as if it had come to him suddenly — the day and place are specified. 7 There is a descrip- tion of it that is weird and uncanny — the details are almost like those of a nightmare. 8 And yet if we look into Nietzsche's 1 The relevant passages are Werke, XII, 51-69 (or, pocket ed. VI, 3-21), 369-71; Joyful Science, §341; Zarathustra, III, ii, §2; xiii; xvi; IV, xix; Beyond Good and Evil, §56; Will to Power, §§55, 417, 617, 1053-67. The reference to the allied Pythagorean speculation is in "The Use and Harm of History, etc.," sect. 2. 2 Op. cit., p. 133. 8 Op. cit., pp. 137-8. 4 P. J. Mobius, op. cit., p. 103. 5 Op. cit., p. 291. 6 Grace N. Dolson, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 83. 7 Ecco Homo, III, vi, § 1. c Joyful Science, § 341. 163 164 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER general psychological world, we see that the idea arose with something like logical necessity, that it has broad theoretic grounds. First, we must remember that to Nietzsche the world was a finite quantity (as explained in the last chapter). Undulations in the amount of existence, now more and now less, were to him unthinkable. He believed that the modern doctrine of the con- servation of energy pointed that way. Fixed or definite, and infinite were contradictory terms. A refusal to speak of infinite force he regarded as one of the marks of scientific, in contrast with the old religious habits of thought. 9 Second, he refused to admit the idea of empty space around the world. The notion of infinite space was gratuitous ; he thought it based on the conception of empty space, which is an abstraction and unreal, all space being full of force of some kind. Space itself, as a separate category from matter or force, was an unreality, a subjective form. 10 But on the other hand (thirdly), he had come by this time to believe in the reality of time; there was a before and after irrespective of our thought or experience of it — and to this before and after no limits could be set, it was infinite. 11 a We have then so far a finite sum of force working in infinite time. And now, following ordinary ideas of causality, he argues that there can have been no beginning to the activity of the force (this a fourth point), that change of some kind must have been forever going on. But, the question may be asked, Granting all this, may not the activity at some time come to an end ? May not an equilibrium be finally reached — a state in which, activity having played its part, becoming passes into being, a changeless goal of all preceding change? Nietzsche does not deny that this is conceivable, but he argues that if it were really possible, the goal would have been already reached, since time extends infinitely backwards as well as forwards and in absolutely unlimited time everything that could have hap- pened must have happened. The simple fact then that an equilibrium does not exist now (for once reached, it would last forever), proves that there never was an equilibrium, and never °Werhe, XII, 52-3; Will to Power, §§1063, 1066. 10 Werke, XII, 54, §§97-8; Will to Power, § 1067. "Werke, XII, 51, §90; 54, §98. THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 165 could be — that the world is eternally in process of change. The mechanical view, as sometimes expounded, leads one to antici- pate a final state in which heat and all forms of energy are evenly dispersed through space, so that transformations become thereafter impossible (save by a miracle of some kind) ; but Nietzsche goes so far as to say that if the mechanical theory cannot escape the consequences of a final stationary state, such as Sir William Thomson describes, the theory is ipso facto dis- proved. If any such state were really possible, it would have been attained in the limitless stretches of past time, and we (if there were any sense in speaking of "we" in such a connection, being ourselves changeable beings) should be in it. 12b Fifthly, so far as the special cosmic order now existing is concerned, Nietzsche thinks, agreeably to current views, that it had a beginning sometime in the past. There -was some rela- tively simple state of forces, from which the present more or less organized world has gradually evolved. Moreover, all the processes of this evolution, even the minutest details of it, hang together — so much so, that if any least thing were different from what it is, all other things would have to be different too, and if we approve any one thing we have to approve everything else, each being bound up with the others, whether as condition or consequence. And as this cosmic order began, so it will in the course of time end, the forces relapsing into some such unorganized state as they had at the start. 13 This view of a relative beginning and end of things is a common one, and it is at least not uncommon to think that after one ending there will in time be another beginning — so that, if we go far enough along this line, we gain the idea of a succession of worlds or cosmic orders. So far as there is any novelty in Nietzsche's speculation, it is from this point on. It by no means follows, he thinks, that because these worlds follow one another they will, be like one another, save under certain extremely general aspects. They may differ widely. Mechanical laws as we know them may not be strictly necessary, and so it may be with chemical affinity 12 See Werlce, XFi, 53, §95; 55-6, §§100, 103; 62, §114; Will to Power, §§ 1062, 1066. 13 Werlce, XII, 54, § 97; Will to Power, § 1032. 166 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER and cohesion — they may be simply temporary habits of things, holding while the present cosmic order lasts, and perhaps not universally or permanently even here. All depends on the initial state of things, the way forces happen to have been col- located there. With one combination or constellation of forces one kind of world will result, and with another, another. There may be as many different kinds of worlds as there can be different arrangements and collocations of the primitive forces. To our world may then succeed a totally different kind of world, just as one totally different may have preceded it. There is no ordering of these things, no controlling design regu- lating them — it is all chance and accident. 14 But — and here is the real turning-point of Nietzsche's thought — in the course of time, supposing that it goes on indefinitely, the different possible combinations of forces will have all been made. If the total amount of force, however vast and practicably incalculable, is definite, fixed, the number of combinations which its con- stituent parts can make is not limitless; the number may be myriad, but it cannot be infinite. If then the limit is reached, there can thereafter only be repetitions of the combinations that have already occurred — new ones are impossible (sixth point). 15 I may offer a very simple — seemingly too simple — illustration on my own account. Suppose that we — the reader and I — are playing dice. We throw various numbers, various combinations oi numbers. There is no regularity in the succession — it is all haphazard (if we play a fair game and let chance be chance absolutely). Some time may elapse before either of us reaches any special combination, say double sixes. And yet, sooner or later we do reach it, both of us do — not because we will it, but because chance itself in the course of time is bound to give it to us. If we play on and on and do not reach it, we inevitably suspect that something is the matter with the dice, i.e., that they have been loaded, that pure chance does not rule. So of each and every combination — we are bound to throw them all, if we take sufficient time, and there has been no tampering with the dice. But after we have thrown all the combinations, what "WerJce, XII, 58-60; Will to Power, § 1066. 15 Werke, XII, 51, § 90; 61, § 109; Will to Power, § 1066. THE IDEA OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE 167 else is there for us to do, if we go on playing, but to throw the old ones over again? The recurrence of the old ones is of Strict necessity — it is chance and necessity in one. The order of the throws may be different, is likely to be different — but the repetitions themselves are unavoidable. Nor if there were numbers running into the thousands, or millions, or tens of millions, would it make any difference; if we played long enough, all possible combinations would in time be exhausted, and then, if we continued to play, the old combinations would be repeated. Moreover, if we or others had been playing before, there would have been, however great the number of combina- tions, the same exhaustion of them in course of time, and there- after a repetition of previous ones. Repetition, repetition without end, is the law in conditions like these. Grant the suppositions, finite numbers, infinite time, and pure chance (i.e., no inter- ference from an arbitrary will outside, whether in forming the dice to start with or in influencing our muscles in throwing), and the result is inevitable. The illustration is ridiculously simple — but I think it covers the nerve of Nietzsche's argument. Assuming his preliminary data, the same initial combination of the forces of existence would recur again and again, and each time there would ensue from that combination according to ordinary laws of cause and effect the same identical cosmic evolution, with exactly the same result at any given instant of the process. Indeed, Nietzsche argues that only in this way is there such a thing as strict iden- tity. In our existing world, no two things can be exactly alike, if only because they are differently located in space and outside forces impinge differently upon them, and no one thing can be identical with itself at different times for similar reasons. Whenever then in the distant ranges of the future, after our present world has relapsed into the simple and relatively chaotic state from which it once emerged, the fortuitous course of things shall again bring about a combination of forces like that of which our world is the result, a world precisely similar to ours will again develope and the whole secular process of evolution be repeated : at a certain point everything will be like what it is now, the stars, the sea, the land, the peoples, the philosophies, the arguments, you and I, down to the last detail 168 NIETZSCHE THE THINKER of our existence. 16 Grant chance (i.e., the absence of any set will controlling things), grant a finite sum of forces which never began and never will cease to act, grant infinite time, grant the negation of infinite empty space in which forces might be dissipated, grant the determinist view of the connection of events, and the result is apparently unescapable. c It also follows that to such a recurrence of the world, another recurrence will be added later on, and to that, still another, — and so on ad infinitum. With equal necessity it follows that earlier editions of the world have existed — in this direction too, ad infinitum. As stated, there may be many kinds of worlds, and varying orders of succession between them. When our world passes away, it does not follow that at once or at any definite time it will be recomposed. Nietzsche especially warns us against the analogies of recurring planetary courses, or the ebb and flow of the sea, or day and night, or the seasons — all of which succeed one another regularly. 17 The point is not when or in what order recurrence takes place, but that it takes place. In one place he says that between each combination and its recurrence, all other possible combinations will have had their turn ; 18 this might be so, but it does not appear to be necessary — the repetition of the combination might come soon ; the only certainty is that it will come sometime, even if the whole gamut of combinations has to be swept. But though no regular order of succession can be predicated, existence comes in general to have a cyclic or circular character in this way. The same things are ever and anon recurring. Things do not simply cease to be as we commonly imagine — in time they come back to themselves. The flow of existence is not straight on — it bends and returns on itself. Hence Nietzsche's simile of the ring.