Part 4
Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's _Will to Life_ and Darwin's _Struggle for Existence_ by the _Will to Power_. In his view the fight is not for life--bare existence--but for power. And he has a great deal to say--somewhat beside the mark--of the mean and paltry conditions those Englishmen must have had in view who set up the modest conception of the struggle for life. It appears to him as if they had imagined a world in which everybody is glad if he can only keep body and soul together. But life is only an expression for the minimum. In itself life seeks, not self-preservation alone, but self-increase, and this is precisely the "will to power." It is therefore obvious that there is no difference of principle between the new catchword and the old; for the struggle for existence necessarily leads to the conflict of forces and the fight for power. Now a system of justice, seen from this standpoint, is a factor in the conflict of forces. Conceived as supreme, as a remedy for every kind of struggle, it would be a principle hostile to life and destructive of the future and progress of humanity.
Something similar was in the mind of Lassalle, when he declared that the standpoint of justice was a bad standpoint in the life of nations. What is significant of Nietzsche is his love of fighting for its own sake, in contrast to the modern humanitarian view. To Nietzsche the greatness of a movement is to be measured by the sacrifices it demands. The hygiene which keeps alive millions of weak and useless beings who ought rather to die, is to him no true progress. A dead level of mediocre happiness assured to the largest possible majority of the miserable creatures we nowadays call men, would be to him no true progress. But to him, as to Renan, the rearing of a human species higher and stronger than that which now surrounds us (the "Superman"), even if this could only be achieved by the sacrifice of masses of such men as we know, would be a great, a real progress. Nietzsche's visions, put forth in all seriousness, of the training of the Superman and his assumption of the mastery of the world, bear so strong a resemblance to Renan's dreams, thrown out half in jest, of a new Asgard, a regular manufactory of Æsir (_Dialogues philosophiques_, 117), that we can scarcely doubt the latter's influence. But what Renan wrote under the overwhelming impression of the Paris Commune, and, moreover, in the form of dialogue, allowing both _pro_ and _con_. to be heard, has crystallised in Nietzsche into dogmatic conviction. One is therefore surprised and hurt to find that Nietzsche never mentions Renan otherwise than grudgingly. He scarcely alludes to the aristocratic quality of his intellect, but he speaks with repugnance of that respect for the gospel of the humble which Renan everywhere discloses, and which is undeniably at variance with his hope of the foundation of a breeding establishment for supermen.
Renan, and after him Taine, turned against the almost religious feelings which were long entertained in the new Europe towards the first French Revolution. Renan regretted the Revolution betimes on national grounds; Taine, who began by speaking warmly of it, changed his mind on closer inquiry. Nietzsche follows in their footsteps. It is natural for modern authors, who feel themselves to be the children of the Revolution, to sympathise with the men of the great revolt; and certainly the latter do not receive their due in the present anti-revolutionary state of feeling in Europe. But these authors, in their dread of what in political jargon is called Cæsarism, and in their superstitious belief in mass movements, have overlooked the fact that the greatest revolutionaries and liberators are not the united small, but the few great; not the small ungenerous, but the great and generous, who are willing to bestow justice and well-being and intellectual growth upon the rest.
There are two classes of revolutionary spirits: those who feel instinctively drawn to Brutus, and those who equally instinctively are attracted by Cæsar. Cæsar is the great type; neither Frederick the Great nor Napoleon could claim more than a part of his qualities. The modern poetry of the 'forties teems with songs in praise of Brutus, but no poet has sung Cæsar. Even a poet with so little love for democracy as Shakespeare totally failed to recognise his greatness; he gave us a pale caricature of his figure and followed Plutarch in glorifying Brutus at his expense. Even Shakespeare could not see that Cæsar placed a very different stake on the table of life from that of his paltry murderer. Cæsar was descended from Venus; in his form was grace. His mind had the grand simplicity which is the mark of the greatest; his nature was nobility. He, from whom even to-day all supreme power takes its name, had every attribute that belongs to a commander and ruler of the highest rank. Only a few men of the Italian Renaissance have reached such a height of genius. His life was a guarantee of all the progress that could be accomplished in those days. Brutus's nature was doctrine, his distinguishing mark the narrowness that seeks to bring back dead conditions and that sees omens of a call in the accident of a name. His style was dry and laborious, his mind unfertile. His vice was avarice, usury his delight. To him the provinces were conquests beyond the pale. He had five senators of Salamis starved to death because the town could not pay. And on account of a dagger-thrust, which accomplished nothing and hindered nothing of what it was meant to hinder, this arid brain has been made a sort of genius of liberty, merely because men have failed to understand what it meant to have the strongest, richest and noblest nature invested with supreme power.
From what has been said above it will easily be understood that Nietzsche derives justice entirely from the active emotions, since in his view revengeful feelings are always low. He does not dwell on this point, however. Older writers had seen in the instinct of retaliation the origin of punishment. Stuart Mill, in his _Utilitarianism_, derived justice from already established punitive provisions (_justum_ from _jussum_), which were precautionary measures, not reprisals. Rée, in his book on the _Origin of Conscience_, defended the kindred proposition that punishment is not a consequence of the sense of justice, but _vice versa_. The English philosophers in general derive the bad conscience from punishment. The value of the latter is supposed to consist in awakening a sense of guilt in the delinquent.
Against this Nietzsche enters a protest. He maintains that punishment only hardens and benumbs a man; in fact, that the judicial procedure itself prevents the criminal from regarding his conduct as reprehensible; since he is made to witness precisely the same kind of acts as those he has committed--spying, entrapping, outwitting and torturing--all of which are sanctioned when exercised against him in the cause of justice. For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal's "sin"; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism with which the Russians suffer to this day. In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him "better."
The bad conscience, then, is still unexplained. Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced--when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was inviolable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself--feelings of enmity, cruelty, delight in change, in hazard, violence, persecution, destruction--and thus the bad conscience originated.
When the State came into existence--not by a social contract, as Rousseau and his contemporaries assumed--but by a frightful tyranny imposed by a conquering race upon a more numerous, but unorganised population, then all the latter's instinct of freedom turned inwards; its active force and will to power were directed against man himself. And this was the soil which bore such ideals of beauty as self-denial, self-sacrifice, unselfishness. The delight in self-sacrifice is in its origin a phase of cruelty; the bad conscience is a will for self-abuse.
Then by degrees guilt came to be felt as a debt, to the past, to the ancestors; a debt that had to be paid back in sacrifices--at first of nourishment in its crudest sense--in marks of honour and in obedience; for all customs, as the work of ancestors, are at the same time their commands.[7] There is a constant dread of not giving them enough; the firstborn, human and animal, are sacrificed to them. Fear of the founder grows in proportion as the power of the race increases. Sometimes he becomes transformed into a god, in which the origin of the god from fear is clearly seen.
The feeling of owing a debt to the deity steadily grew through the centuries, until the recognition of the Christian deity as universal god brought about the greatest possible outburst of guilty feeling. Only in our day is any noticeable diminution of this sense of guilt to be traced; but where the consciousness of sin reaches its culminating point, there the bad conscience eats its way like a cancer, till the sense of the impossibility of paying the debt--atoning for the sin--is supreme and with it is combined the idea of eternal punishment. A curse is now imagined to have been laid upon the founder of the race (Adam), and all sin becomes original sin. Indeed, the evil principle is attributed to Nature herself, from whose womb man has sprung--until we arrive at the paradoxical expedient in which tormented Christendom has found a temporary consolation for two thousand years: God offers himself for the guilt of mankind, pays himself in his own flesh and blood.
What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity, his capacity of judge and executioner, and in the next place to eternity, the "Beyond," pain without end, eternal punishment in hell.
In order rightly to understand the origin of ascetic ideals, we must, moreover, consider that the earliest generations of spiritual and contemplative natures lived under a fearful pressure of contempt on the part of the hunters and warriors. The unwarlike element in them was despicable. They had no other means of holding their own than that of inspiring fear. This they could only do by cruelty to themselves, mortification and self-discipline in a hermit's life. As priests, soothsayers and sorcerers they then struck superstitious terror into the masses. The ascetic priest is the unsightly larva from which the healthy philosopher has emerged. Under the dominion of the priests our earth became the ascetic planet; a squalid den careering through space, peopled by discontented and arrogant creatures, who were disgusted with life, abhorred their globe as a vale of tears, and who in their envy and hatred of beauty and joy did themselves as much harm as possible.
Nevertheless the self-contradiction we find in asceticism--life turned _against_ life--is of course only apparent. In reality the ascetic ideal corresponds to a decadent life's profound need of healing and tending. It is an ideal that points to depression and exhaustion; by its help life struggles against death. It is life's device for self-preservation. Its necessary antecedent is a morbid condition in the tamed human being, a disgust with life, coupled with the desire to be something else, to be somewhere else, raised to the highest pitch of emotion and passion.
The ascetic priest is the embodiment of this very wish. By its power he keeps the whole herd of dejected, fainthearted, despairing and unsuccessful creatures, fast to life. The very fact that he himself is sick makes him their born herdsman. If he were healthy, he would turn away with loathing from all this eagerness to re-label weakness, envy, Pharisaism and false morality as virtue. But, being himself sick, he is called upon to be an attendant in the great hospital of sinners--the Church. He is constantly occupied with sufferers who seek the cause of their pain outside themselves; he teaches the patient that the guilty cause of his pain is himself. Thus he diverts the rancour of the abortive man and makes him less harmful, by letting a great part of his resentment recoil on himself. The ascetic priest cannot properly be called a physician; he mitigates suffering and invents consolations of every kind, both narcotics and stimulants.
The problem was to contend with fatigue and despair, which had seized like an epidemic upon great masses of men. Many remedies were tried. First, it was sought to depress vitality to the lowest degree: not to will, not to desire, not to work, and so on; to become apathetic (Pascal's _Il faut s'abêtir_). The object was sanctification, a hypnotising of all mental life, a relaxation of every purpose, and consequently freedom from pain. In the next place, mechanical activity was employed as a narcotic against states of depression: the "blessing of labour." The ascetic priest, who has to deal chiefly with sufferers of the poorer classes, reinterprets the task of the unfortunate drudge for him, making him see in it a benefit. Then again, the prescription of a little, easily accessible joy, is a favourite remedy for depression; such as gladdening others, helping them in love of one's neighbour. Finally, the decisive cure is to organise all the sick into an immense hospital, to found a congregation of them. The disinclination that accompanies the sense of weakness is thereby combated, since the mass feels strong in its inner cohesion.
But the chief remedy of the ascetic priest was, after all, his reinterpretation of the feeling of guilt as "sin." The inner suffering was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out. Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, staring--in spite of Job--at guilt as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More pain! More pain!" Everything served the ascetic ideal. And then arose epidemics like those of St. Vitus's dance and the flagellants, witches' hysteria and the wholesale delirium of extravagant sects (which still lingers in otherwise beneficially disciplined bodies such as the Salvation Army).
The ascetic ideal has as yet no real assailants; there is no decided prophet of a new ideal. Inasmuch as since the time of Copernicus science has constantly tended to deprive man of his earlier belief in his own importance, its influence is rather favourable to asceticism than otherwise. At present the only real enemies and underminers of the ascetic ideal are to be found in the charlatans of that ideal, in its hypocritical champions, who excite and maintain distrust of it.
As the senselessness of suffering was felt to be a curse, the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning; a meaning which brought a new flood of suffering with it, but which was better than none. In our day a new ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture.
[7] Compare Lassalle's theory of the original religion of Rome. G. Brandes; _Ferdinand Lassalle_ (London and New York, 1911), pp. 76 ff.
5.
Among Nietzsche's works there is a strange book which bears the title, _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. It consists of four parts, written during the years 1883-85, each part in about ten days, and conceived chapter by chapter on long walks--"with a feeling of inspiration, as though each sentence had been shouted in my ear," as Nietzsche wrote in a private letter.
The central figure and something of the form are borrowed from the Persian _Avesta_. Zarathustra is the mystical founder of a religion whom we usually call Zoroaster. His religion is the religion of purity; his wisdom is cheerful and dauntless, as that of one who laughed at his birth; his nature is light and flame. The eagle and the serpent, who share his mountain cave, the proudest and the wisest of beasts, are ancient Persian symbols.
This work contains Nietzsche's doctrine in the form, so to speak, of religion. It is the Koran, or rather the Avesta, which he was impelled to leave--obscure and profound, high-soaring and remote from reality, prophetic and intoxicated with the future, filled to the brim with the personality of its author, who again is entirely filled with himself.
Among modern books that have adopted this tone and employed this symbolic and allegorical style may be mentioned Mickiewicz's _Book of the Polish Pilgrims_, Slowacki's Anheli, and The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, who was influenced by Mickiewicz. A newer work, known to Nietzsche, is Carl Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881). But all these books, with the exception of Spitteler's, are biblical in their language. Zarathustra, on the other hand, is a book of edification for free spirits.
Nietzsche himself gave this book the highest place among his writings. I do not share this view. The imaginative power which sustains it is not sufficiently inventive, and a certain monotony is inseparable from an archaistic presentment by means of types.
But it is a good book for those to have recourse to who are unable to master Nietzsche's purely speculative works; it contains all his fundamental ideas in the form of poetic recital. Its merit is a style that from the first word to the last is full-toned, sonorous and powerful; now and then rather unctuous in its combative judgments and condemnations; always expressive of self-joy, nay, self-intoxication, but rich in subtleties as in audacities, sure, and at times great. Behind this style lies a mood as of calm mountain air, so light, so ethereally pure, that no infection, no bacteria can live in it--no noise, no stench, no dust assails it, nor does any path lead up.
Clear sky above, open sea at the mountain's foot, and over all a heaven of light, an abyss of light, an azure bell, a vaulted silence above roaring waters and mighty mountain-chains. On the heights Zarathustra is alone with himself, drawing in the pure air in full, deep breaths, alone with the rising sun, alone with the heat of noon, which does not impair the freshness, alone with the voices of the gleaming stars at night.
A good, deep book it is. A book that is bright in its joy of life, dark in its riddles, a book for spiritual mountain-climbers and dare-devils and for the few who are practised in the great contempt of man that loathes the crowd, and in the great love of man that only loathes so deeply because it has a vision of a higher, braver humanity, which it seeks to rear and train.
Zarathustra has sought the refuge of his cave out of disgust with petty happiness and petty virtues. He has seen that men's doctrine of virtue and contentment makes them ever smaller: their goodness is in the main a wish that no one may do them any harm; therefore they forestall the others by doing them a little good. This is cowardice and is called virtue. True, they are at the same time quite ready to attack and injure, but only those who are once for all at their mercy and with whom it is safe to take liberties. This is called bravery and is a still baser cowardice. But when Zarathustra tries to drive out the cowardly devils in men, the cry is raised against him, "Zarathustra is godless."
He is lonely, for all his former companions have become apostates; their young hearts have grown old, and not old even, only weary and slothful, only commonplace--and this they call becoming pious again. "Around light and liberty they once fluttered like gnats and young poets, and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles." They have understood their age. They chose their time well. "For now do all night-birds again fly abroad. Now is the hour of all that dread the light." Zarathustra loathes the great city as a hell for anchorites' thoughts. "All lusts and vices are here at home; but here are also the virtuous, much appointable and appointed virtue. Much appointable virtue with scribe-fingers and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with little breast-stars and padded, haunchless daughters. Here is also much piety and much devout spittle-licking and honey-slavering before the God of hosts. For 'from on high' drippeth the star and the gracious spittle; and upward longeth every starless bosom."
And Zarathustra loathes the State, loathes it as Henrik Ibsen did and more profoundly than he.
To him the State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Its fundamental lie is that it is the people. No; creative spirits were they who created the people and gave it a faith and a love; thus they served life; every people is peculiar to itself, but the State is everywhere the same. The State is to Zarathustra that "where the slow suicide of all is called life." The State is for the many too many. Only where the State leaves oft does the man who is not superfluous begin; the man who is a bridge to the Superman.
From states Zarathustra has fled up to his mountain, into his cave.
In forbearance and pity lay his greatest danger. Rich in, the little lies of pity he dwelt among men.
"Stung from head to foot by poisonous flies and hollowed out like a stone by many drops of malice, thus did I sit among them, saying to myself: Innocent is everything petty of its pettiness. Especially they who call themselves the good, they sting in all innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they be just towards me?
"He who dwelleth among the good, him teacheth pity to lie. Pity breedeth bad air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable.
"Their stiff wise men did I call wise, not stiff. Their grave-diggers did I call searchers and testers--thus did I learn to confound speech. The grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. From old refuse arise evil exhalations. Upon the mountains one should live."