CHAPTER XCII

THE OVERMAN

Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to marry one, but she would not have him; after which he wrote contemptuously of them all. Despite the fact that he was a clergyman’s son, he suffered from hereditary syphilis, and went insane--a tragic waste of the greatest genius of modern times.

Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast.

Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of his writings--easy for the average person, who has never experienced such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest imaginative writing of several centuries.

But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the human spirit.

One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of the aristocratic over the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a conqueror of new universes for our race.

There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his influence counts on the side of the forces he hated.

Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.”

Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote “Uebermensch.”

This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” with fervor and splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote a portion of this passage:

Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman--a, cord above an abyss.

A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.

I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across.

I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other shore.

You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth.

Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan & Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers, and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.”

Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the whole Prussian state machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms; when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his social thought for life.

I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern.

Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen a photograph of Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence.

Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as the Christian hermits and monks--and for the same reason, because he wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and history repeats itself--the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught! Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman--but he begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there.

##