A Protest Against Himself
Nietzsche is far from regarding his philosophy as timely. He was a proud and aristocratic character, spoiled from childhood by an unfaltering admiration on the part of both his mother and sister. It was unfortunate for him that his father had died before he could influence the early years of his son through wholesome discipline. Not enjoying a vigorous constitution Nietzsche was greatly impressed with the thought that a general decadence was overshadowing mankind. The truth was that his own bodily system was subject to many ailments which hampered his mental improvement. He was hungering for health, he envied the man of energy, he longed for strength and vigor, but all this was denied him, and so these very shortcomings of his own bodily strength—his own decadence—prompted in him a yearning for bodily health, for an unbounded exercise of energy, and for success. These were his dearest ideals, and his desire for power was his highest ambition. He saw in the history of human thought, the development of the notion of the “true world,” which to him was a mere subjective phantom, a superstition; but a reaction would set in, and he prophesied that the doom of nihilism would sweep over the civilized world applying the torch to its temples, churches and institutions. Upon the ruins of the old world the real man, the overman, would rise and establish his own empire, an empire of unlimited power in which the herds, i. e., the common people would become subservient.
Nietzsche’s philosophy forms a strange contrast to his own habits of life. A model of virtue, he made himself the advocate of vice, and gloried in it. He encouraged the robber1 to rob, but he himself was honesty incarnate; he incited the people to rebel against authority of all kinds, but he himself was a “model child” in the nursery, a “model scholar” in school, and a “model soldier” while serving in the German army. His teachers as well as the officers of his regiment fail to find words enough to praise Nietzsche’s obedience.2
Nietzsche’s professors declare that he distinguished himself “durch pünktlichen Gehorsam” (p. 3); his sister tells us that she and her brother were “ungeheuer artig, wahre Musterkinder” (p. 36). He makes a good soldier, and, in spite of his denunciations of posing, displays theatrical vanity in having himself photographed with drawn sword (the scabbard is missing). His martial mustache almost anticipates the tonsorial art of the imperial barber of the present Kaiser; and yet his spectacled eyes and good-natured features betray the peacefulness of his intentions. He plays the soldier only, and would have found difficulty in killing even a fly.
Nietzsche disclaims ever having learned anything in any school, but there never was a more grateful German pupil in Germany. He composed fervid poems on his school—the well known institution Schulpforta, which on account of its severe discipline he praises, not in irony but seriously, as the “narrow gate.”3
Nietzsche denounces the German character, German institutions, and the German language, his mother-tongue, and is extremely unfair in his denunciations. He takes pleasure in the fact that Deutsch (see Ulfila’s Bible translation) originally means “pagans or heathen,” and hopes that the dear German people will earn the honor of being called pagans. (La Gaya Scienza, p. 176.) A reaction against his patriotism set in immediately after the war, when he became acquainted with the brutality of some vulgar specimens of the victorious nation,—most of them non-combatants.4
Nietzsche not only wrote in German and made the most involved constructions, but when the war broke out he asked his adopted country Switzerland, in which he had acquired citizenship after accepting a position as professor of classical languages at the University of Basel, for leave of absence to join the German army. In the Franco-Prussian war he might have had a chance to live up to his theories of struggle, but unfortunately the Swiss authorities did not allow him to join the army, and granted leave of absence only on condition that he would serve as a nurse. Such is the irony of fate. While Nietzsche stood up for a ruthless assertion of strength and for a suppression of sympathy which he denounced as a relic of the ethics of a negation of life, his own tender soul was so over-sensitive that his sister feels justified in tracing his disease back to the terrible impressions he received during the war.
Nietzsche speaks of the king as “the dear father of the country.”5 If there was a flaw in Nietzsche’s moral character, it was goody-goodyness; and his philosophy is a protest against the principles of his own nature. While boldly calling himself “the first unmoralist,” justifying even license itself and defending the coarsest lust,6 his own life might have earned him the name of sissy, and he shrank in disgust from moral filth wherever he met with it in practical life.
Nietzsche denounced pessimism, and yet his philosophy was, as he himself confesses, the last consequence of pessimism. Hegel declared (says Nietzsche in Morgenröthe, p. 8), “Contradiction moves the world, all things are self-contradictory”; “we (adds Nietzsche) carry pessimism even into logic.” He proposes to vivisect morality; “but (adds he) you cannot vivisect a thing without killing it.” Thus his “unmoralism” is simply an expression of his earnestness to investigate the moral problem, and he expresses the result in the terse sentence; Moral ist Nothlüge (Menschliches, p. 63.)
He preached struggle and hatred, and yet was so tender-hearted that in an hour of dejection he confessed to his sister with a sigh: “I was not at all made to hate or be an enemy.”7 The decadence which he imputes to mankind is a mere reflection of his own state of mind, and the strength which he praises is that quality in which he is most sorely lacking. Nietzsche himself had the least possible connection with active life. He was unmarried, had no children, nor any interests beyond his ambition, and having served as professor of the classical languages for some time at the small university of Basel, he was for the greater part of his life without a calling, without duties, without aims. He never ventured to put his own theories into practice. He did not even try to rise as a prophet of his own philosophy, and remained in isolation to the very end of his life.
Nietzsche must have felt the contradiction between his theories and his habits of life, and it appears that he suffered under it more than can be estimated by an impartial reader of his books. He was like the bird in the cage who sings of liberty, or an apoplectic patient who dreams of deeds of valor as a knight in tournament or as a wrestler in the prize ring. Never was craving for power more closely united with impotence!
It is characteristic of him that he said, “If there were a God, how should I endure not to be God?” and so his ambition impelled him at least to prophesy the coming of his ideal, i. e., robust health, full of bodily vigor and animal spirits, unchecked by any rule of morality, and an unstinted use of power.
Nietzsche had an exaggerated conception of his vocation and he saw in himself the mouthpiece of that grandest and deepest truth, viz., that man should dare to be himself without any regard of morality or consideration for his fellow beings. And here we have the tragic element of his life. Nietzsche, the atheist, deemed himself a God incarnate, and the despiser of the Crucified, suffered a martyr’s fate in offering his own life to the cause of his hope. The earnestness with which he preached his wild and untenable doctrines appeals to us and renders his figure sympathetic, which otherwise would be grotesque. Think of a man who in his megalomania preaches a doctrine that justifies an irresponsible desire for power! Would he not be ridiculous in his impotence to actualize his dream? and on the other hand, if he were strong enough to practice what he preached, if like another Napoleon, he would make true his dreams of enslaving the world, would not mankind in self-defense soon rise in rebellion and treat him as a criminal, rendering him and his followers incapable of doing harm? But Nietzsche’s personality, weak and impotent and powerless to appear as the overman and to subjugate the world to his will, suffered excruciating pains in his soul and tormented himself to death, which came to him in the form of decadence—a softening of the brain.
Poor Nietzsche! what a bundle of contradictions! None of these contradictions are inexplicable. All of them are quite natural. They are the inevitable reactions against a prior enthusiasm, and he swings, according to the law of the pendulum, to the opposite extreme of his former position.
How did Nietzsche develop into an unmoralist? Simply by way of reaction against the influence of Schopenhauer in combination with the traditional Christianity.
Nietzsche passed through three periods in his development. He was first a follower of Schopenhauer and an admirer of Wagner, but he shattered his idols and became a convert to Auguste Comte’s positivism. Schopenhauer was the master at whose feet Nietzsche sat; from him he learned boldness of thought and atheism, that this world is a world of misery and struggle. He accepted for a time Schopenhauer’s pessimism but rebelled in his inmost soul against the ethical doctrine of the negation of the will. He retained Schopenhauer’s contempt for previous philosophers (presumably he never tried to understand them) yet he resented the thought of a negation of life and replaced it by a most emphatic assertion. He thus recognized the reactionary spirit of Schopenhauer, whose system is a Christian metaphysics. Nietzsche denounces the ethics of a negation of the will as a disease, and since nature in the old system is regarded as the source of moral evil the idea dawns on him that he himself, trying to establish a philosophy of nature, is an immoralist. He now questions morality itself from the standpoint of an affirmation of the will, and at last goes so far as to speak of ideals as a symptom of shallowness.8
Nietzsche argued that our conception of truth and our ideal world is but a phantasmagoria, and the picture of the universe in our consciousness a distorted image of real life. Our pleasures and pains, too, are both transient and subjective. Accordingly it would be a gross mistake for us to exaggerate their importance. What does it matter if we endure a little more or less pain, or of what use are the pleasures in which we might indulge? The realities of life consist in power, and in our dominion over the forces that dominate life. Knowledge and truth are of no use unless they become subservient to this realistic desire for power. They are mere means to an end which is the superiority of the overman, the representative of Nietzsche’s philosophy by whom the mass of mankind are to be enslaved. This view constitutes his third period, in which he wrote those works that are peculiarly characteristic of his own philosophy.
Nietzsche must not be taken too seriously. He was engaged with the deepest problems of life, and published his opinions as to their solution before he had actually attempted to investigate them. He criticised and attacked like the Irishman who hits a head wherever he sees it. Here are the first three rules of his philosophical warfare:
“First: I attack only those causes which are victorious, sometimes I wait till they are victorious. Secondly: I attack them only when I would find no allies, when I stand isolated, when I compromise myself alone. Thirdly: I have never taken a step in public which did not compromise me. That is my criterion of right action.”
A man who adopts this strange criterion of right conduct must produce a strange philosophy. His soul is in an uproar against itself. Says Nietzsche in his Götzendämmerung, Aphorism 45:
“Almost every genius knows as one phase of his development the ‘Catilinary existence,’ so-called, which is a feeling of hatred, of vengeance, of revolution against everything that is, which no longer needs to become... Catiline—the form of Cæsar’s pre-existence.”
Nietzsche changed his views during his life-time, and the unmoralist Nietzsche originated in contradiction to his habitual moralism. He was a man of extremes. As soon as a new thought dawned on him, it took possession of his soul to the exclusion of his prior views, and his later self contradicts his former self.
Nietzsche says:
“The serpent that cannot slough must die. In the same way, the spirits which are prevented from changing their opinions cease to be spirits.”
So we must expect that if Nietzsche had been permitted to continue longer in health, he would have cast off the slough of his immoralism and the negative conceptions of his positivism. His Zarathustra was the last work of his pen, but it is only the most classical expression of the fermentation of his soul, not the final purified result of his philosophy; it is not the solution of the problem that stirred his heart.
While writing his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche characterizes his method of work thus:
“That I proceed with my outpourings considerably like a dilettante and in an immature manner, I know very well, but I am anxious first of all to get rid of the whole polemico-negative material. I wish undisturbedly to sing off, up and down and truly dastardly, the whole gamut of my hostile feelings, ‘that the vaults shall echo back.’9 Later on, i. e., within five years, I shall discard all polemics and bethink myself of a really ‘good work,’ But at present my breast is oppressed with disgust and tribulation. I must expectorate, decorously and indecorously, but radically and for good” [endgültig].
The writings of Nietzsche will make the impression of a youthful immaturity upon any half-way serious reader. There is a hankering after originality which of necessity leads to aberrations and a sovereign contempt for the merits of the past. The world seems endangered, and yet any one who would seriously try to live up to Nietzsche’s ideal must naturally sober down after a while, and we may apply to him what Mephistopheles says of the baccalaureus:
“Yet even from him we’re not in special peril
He will, ere long, to other thoughts incline.
The must may foam absurdly in the barrel.
Nathless, it turns at last to wine.”
Tr. by Bayard Taylor.
Nietzsche did not live long enough to experience a period of matured thought. He died before the fermentation of his mind had come to its normal close, and so his life will remain forever a great torso, without intrinsic worth, but suggestive and appealing only to the immature, including the “herd animal” who would like to be an overman.
The very immaturity of Nietzsche’s view becomes attractive to immature minds. He wrote while his thoughts were still in a state of fermentation, and he died before the wine of his soul was clarified.
Nietzsche is an almost tragic figure that will live in art as a brooding thinker, a representative of the dissatisfied, a man of an insatiable love of life, with wild and unsteady looks, proud in his indomitable self-assertion, but broken in body and spirit. Such he was in his last disease when his mind was wrapt in the eternal night of dementia, the oppressive consciousness of which made him exclaim in lucid moments the pitiable complaint. “Mutter, ich bin dumm” As such he is represented in Klein’s statue,10 which in its pathetic posture is a psychological masterpiece.
Nietzsche’s works are poetic effusions more than philosophical expositions and yet we would hesitate to call him a poet. His poems are not poetical in the usual sense. They lack poetry and yet they appeal not only to his admirers, but also to his critics and enemies. Most of them are artificial yet they are so characteristic that they are interesting specimens of a peculiar kind of taste. They strike us as ingenious, because they reflect his eccentricities.
In a poem entitled “Ecce Homo”11 he characterizes himself:
“Yea, I know from whence I came!
Never satiate, like the flame
Glow I and consume me too
Into light turns what I find,
Cinders do I leave behind,
Flame am I, ’tis surely true.”
Notes
1 E.g.:
“Bitte nie! Lass dies Gewimmer!
Nimm, ich bitte dich, nimm immer!”
2 Compare Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
3 Leben, pp. 90-97.
4 (See, e. g., Leben, II., 1, pp. 108-111.) “Nach dem Kriege missfiel mir der Luxus, die Franzosenverachtung,” etc., p. 108. “Ich halte das jetzige Preussen für eine der Cultur höchst gefährliche Macht.” Nietzsche ridicules the German language as barbarous in sound (La Gaya Scienza, pp. 138-140), “wälderhaft, heiser, wie aus räucherigen Stuben und unhöflichen Gegenden.” Unique is the origin of the standard style of modern high German from the bureaucratic slang, “kanzleimässig schreiben, das war etwas Vornehmes” (La Gaya Scienza, p. 138), and at present the German changes into an “Offizierdeutsch” (ibid., p. 139). Nietzsche suspects, “the German depth,” “die deutsche Tiefe,” to be a mere mental dyspepsia (see “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” p. 211), saying, “Der Deutsche verdaut seine Ereignisse schlecht, or wird nie damit fertig; die deutsche Tiefe ist oft nur eine schwere, zögernde Verdauung.” Nevertheless, he holds that the old-fashioned German depth is better than modern Prussian “Schneidigkeit und Berliner Witz und Sand.” He prefers the company of the Swiss to that of his countrymen. (See also “Was den Deutschen abgeht,” Vol. 8, p. 108.)
5 “Unser lieber König,” “der Landesvater,” etc. See Leben, I., p. 24, and IL, 1, p. 248, “Unser lieber alter Kaiser Wilhelm,” and “wir Preussen waren wirklich stolz.” These expressions occur in Nietzsche’s description of the Emperor’s appearance at Bayreuth.
6 E.g., “Auch der schädlichste Mensch ist vielleicht immer noch der allernützlichste in Hinsicht auf Erhaltung der Art,” etc. La Gaya Scienza, p. 3 ff.
7 “Ich bin so gar nicht zum Hassen und zum Feind sein gemacht!”
8 See, e. g., Leben, I., p. 135, where he speaks of a new “Freigeisterei,” denouncing the “libres penseurs” as “unverbesserliche Flachköpfe und Hanswürste,” adding, “Sie glauben allesammt noch an’s ‘Ideal.’”
9 “Dass das Gewölbe wiederhallt,”—a quotation from Goethe’s “Faust.”
10 Reproduced as the frontispiece of this book.
11 “Ja, ich weiss woher ich stamme!
Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme,
Glühe und verzehr ich mich,
licht wird alles was ich fasse,
Kohle alles was ich lasse:
Flamme bin ich sicherlich!”