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Typos — p. 171: unsignificant [= insignificant]; p. 179: virtú [= virtù]; p. 180, n *: "Z., Of Old and New Tables," [= Z., "Of Old and New Tables,"]; p. 189: fulness [= fullness]; p. 192: frowardness [= forwardness]
- p. 153 IV Nietzsche: The Moralist * Having grown used to getting much of our mental work done for us; living at a time when even thinking * Delivered at the University of London, December 9th, 1908. Because we often fail to follow his line of thought, are we to deny that he is thinking in a straight line? And may we not, by so doing, make him responsible for a fault which he most probably is quite innocent of? These seem to me questions which might well be put, before we hastily proclaim our author's philosophy as unsystematic. We are spoilt children, in this sense, but spoilt children are generally so, in both acceptations of the word; and there is no doubt that the reception which Nietzsche's philosophy has met with, shows very pointedly how completely former philosophers have spoilt us. Nietzsche said to his disciples:— "Ye say ye believe in Zarathustra? But what is Zarathustra worth? Ye are my faithful ones: but what are all faithful ones worth? "When ye had not yet sought yourselves, ye found me. Thus do all faithful ones; hence all belief is worth so little. "Now I ask you to lose me and find yourselves, not until all of you have disowned me, shall I return unto you." * This is an exhortation in favour of independent mental exercise. No teacher who valued his teaching * Z., "Of the Giving Virtue," ¶ 3. When we approach Nietzsche's philosophy, we must be prepared to be independent thinkers; in fact, the greatest virtue of his philosophy is perhaps the subtlety with which it imposes the obligation upon one, of thinking alone, of scoring off one's own bat, and of shifting intellectually for one's self. "I am a railing alongside the stream; whoever is able to seize me, may seize me, your crutch, however, I am not." * The average philosopher makes disciples and enslaves them. Who has not been, for a time, the slave of Kant's Categorical Imperative, of Mills' Utilitarianism, of Spencer's Administrative Nihilism, of Darwin's Struggle for Existence? Nietzsche is prouder when he lends a man the courage to think honestly and courageously for himself, than when he makes him his proselyte. "Have ye courage, O my brethren? Are ye stout-hearted? I do not mean courage in the presence of witnesses, but the courage of hermits and eagles on which not even a God looketh any more. "Cold souls, mules, blind folk, drunken folk I do not call stout-hearted. Courage hath he who knoweth fear but subdueth fear; he who seeth the abyss, but with pride. He who seeth the abyss, but with the eagle's * Z., "Of the Pale Criminal." "If ye want to rise high, use your own legs! Do not let yourselves be carried upwards, sit not down on strange backs and heads!" † The nearer we get to the heart of Nietzsche's teaching, the more honestly convinced we become, that he is rather a friend walking at our elbow, in the open, suggesting, insinuating, exhorting and chaffing, than a herdsman looking for a herd which he may lead and squeeze into a pen. This, in fact, is the test underlying Nietzscheism. If we are of the herd, we naturally sniff around for our fold, for our rules, and formulas, for our restrictions and our constraints; we have learned to love these things, and we cry aloud, when they are not to be found: "behold our leader has no system! He is but a bungler who has no business with herds!" — no, indeed, Nietzsche had no business with herds; this is true. In respect of the herd, he was certainly not compos mentis; but then, to do him justice, he never claimed to be. However incredible the statement may sound, it is nevertheless true, that Nietzsche's philosophy actually constitutes one regularly organised whole. Even the course I was compelled to adopt in these lectures, is evidence enough of this; for, after giving you his analysis of modern morality, I was driven to describe his ideal Man, that you might have immediate justifica- * Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 4. † Ibid., ¶ 10. Be this as it may, Nietzsche's Sociology, his ideal Man and his morality are all one, and to separate them would be as foolish and as unwarrantable as to separate pity or charity from Christianity. "There are some that preach my doctrine of life," he says of the Bernard Shaws of the world, "but at the same time are preachers of equality and tarantulæ." † Now at the root of all sociologies lies the notion of what life means to the Sociologist. The Hedonists and * See Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review. † Z., "Of Tarantulæ." What do such cross-purposes mean? The layman who thinks an instant upon these questions, becomes desperate. He refuses even to believe that the philosophers, themselves, know what they are talking about. After arriving at a general concept of what social life is, I think we shall be nearer to a clear grasp of the question we have to solve. The whole matter seems to revolve around the point discussed in the second paper, where I was considering Nietzsche's attitude towards pain. There can be no doubt, I suppose, that happiness constitutes the performance of those actions which we are most gifted to perform. Spencer says somewhere that the reason why a rhinoceros ploughs up the ground with his horn, in confinement, is, that having no enemy to fight, he must seek the pleasure of using the weapon of attack and defence, with which he is gifted, in some other way. He is an adept in the violent use of his natural weapon, it consequently gives him pleasure to use it. Now, presumably, this view holds good with us. We find most pleasure in performing those actions for which we are most thoroughly gifted, or, as the biologists say, "to which we are best adapted." Laotze, writing in China, about six centuries before Christ, said: "Whosoever knoweth how to give It seems clear that, since we are rational beings with certain inventive powers, we can exercise some choice as to what actions and what manner of life we shall become adapted to. If it really be a fact, that we, as human beings, are still unadapted, and that a large number of the social actions we perform are still unpleasant to us; it must be pretty evident that no definite mode of life has as yet been fixed upon by our innermost nature, — and, speaking without exaggeration, how could we possibly expect the case to be otherwise; seeing that, with us Europeans, at least, every century turns its predecessor practically upside down? But it is possible, as we shall see, to become adapted, to any conditions, and therefore to grow happy in any conditions, provided of course we survive the process of adaptation. That famous Chinaman, Laotze, did not know, perhaps, that it would be precisely the practical acceptation of his doctrine of adaptation which would help to stamp the character of his nation for over two thousand years. The preachers of Hedonism, therefore, and the Utilitarians, unlike Nietzsche and unlike the Puritans, who, as we shall see, are also anti-adaptationalists, * C. De Harlez, "Textes Tâoïstes," p. 42, chap. xxii. All our hasty Parliamentary bills, all our little devices for alleviating suffering, almost all our philosophies — except Nietzsche's, are merely little essays, little groping attempts on our part, to become adapted to our conditions; that is to say, to become Gifted for the actions we have to perform in our conditions. The growth in London, alone, of the Music-Hall and Theatre business, is a sign of the times. The arduousness of town-life must be forgotten; the unpleasantness of actions, which we are not adapted to, must be mitigated, — how do we try to adapt ourselves to them? This point is important. We try to adapt ourselves to them by making them merely a part of a whole, which we call town-life, and in which we introduce a compensating factor consisting of Theatres, Music-Halls and Exhibitions. The so-called "advanced" and "smart" set who jeer at the Puritan when he inveighs against Music-Halls and Theatres, forget that of the two movements (theirs and his) his is the more advanced, the more pregnant with promises for the future. I do not suppose now, and I never have supposed that the Puritan rails against Music-Halls and Theatres from any deep philosophical motive; but the fact remains, that in doing so, he is more conducive to reform, movement, and instability than those he rails against, because he is preaching against those very measures We are trying hard, nowadays, to become adapted. Socialists think they have found the road thereto. But, is it clearly understood that any method of life, however base, however ignominious, might ultimately mean happiness to us, provided we grew adapted to it? This is precisely the great danger, — the great cloud lowering over mankind. This is the danger Nietzsche came to warn us about. Even in Socialism, happiness may be found, provided we become adapted to it. The question is not, whether Socialism is possible, it is rather: whether it is worthy of us; whether it is dignified for us, in view of our unexhausted powers, to adapt ourselves to it? "This universal degeneracy of mankind to the level of the man of the future," says Nietzsche, "as idealised by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates — this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious. animal (or as they call it, to a man of 'free society'), this brutalising of men into pygmies with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly possible! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion, knows another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind — and perhaps also a new mission!" But let us hear what an avowed Utilitarian and advocate of Liberty for all, John Stuart Mill, had to say on the subject of this maniacal scurry to become adapted, by all means, by all subterfuges, by all prevarications:— "On the contrary, they have become stationary — have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be further improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philanthropists are so industriously working at * Why Mill says "Surely" here, it is impossible to say. If he had said: "surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human stultification," we should have understood. The word "surely" in this sentence betrays the whole attitude of muddle-headedness, which he maintained to the fundamental law of the question he was discussing. It will be retorted that" surely" here is ironical. My reply is that "surely" stands for "one would think," and that it therefore implies that what follows is a probable conclusion which might, at a pinch, be drawn from the premises; whereas neither the reader nor the philosopher has any business to regard the conclusion as possible — much less as probable. This is John Stuart Mill's own expression of astonishment that the state of affairs which Laotze's doctrine of adaptation undoubtedly helped to bring about, was not a progressive, a mercurial one! But it must not be thought that Nietzsche cries out against Socialism alone. It would seem just as great a calamity to him if we became adapted to the conditions existing in Europe at the present day. This hurry and anxiety to achieve complete adaptation at all is what he objects to. He has higher aims for humanity; — aims more compatible with humanity's antecedents and more worthy of its latent possibilities. Hence his bitterness towards the Hedonists and the Utilitarians, hence, too, as we have seen, his exhortation to us, to be less fearful of pain. Honest and truthful in intellectual matters, he could not even think that men are equal. Those to whom this thought gives pleasure, he conjures not to confound pleasure with truth; and, like Professor Huxley, he finds himself compelled to recognise "The Natural Inequality of Men." * On Liberty, Chapter, "The Elements of Well-Being." "Neither shall they become so! For what would be my love for Superman if I spake otherwise? "On a thousand bridges and gangways, they shall throng towards the future, and ever more and more war and inequality shall be set up amongst them. Thus my great love maketh me speak!" * It is the reverse of adaptation that Nietzsche recommends; for only those who regard our present conditions as the best possible, can dare to preach adaptation, as a gospel, to-day. He says rather:— "Good and evil, rich and poor, high and low, and all the names of values: they shall be weapons and clashing signs that life always hath to surpass itself again! "Upwards it striveth to build itself with pillars and stairs, life itself: into far distances it longeth to gaze and outwards after blessed beauties — therefore it needeth height. "And because it needeth height it needeth stairs and contradiction between stairs and those rising beyond them! To rise, striveth life, and to surpass itself in rising." † Nietzsche recognises the natural Inequality of Men; all systems of Sociology who refuse to recognise, or who try to compromise concerning, it, he condemns; and, in his Sociology, he makes provision for it. Those which do not make provision for it do violence unto mankind, they * Z., "Of Tarantulæ." † Ibid. He goes further, however, than the average believer in the Inequality of men usually goes. He sees precisely in this inequality a purpose to be served, a condition to be exploited. Every reader of his philosophy is familiar with his doctrine of chance, — his recommendation to all, to exploit chance and not to avoid it or let it exploit them. Well, precisely in this chance distinction of classes among men, he sees a condition to be exploited and turned to advantage. He says:— "Every elevation of the type 'man' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society — and so will it always be — a society believing in a long scale of gradation of rank and differences of worth among human beings." * The higher men of a society, where gradations of rank are recognised as a necessary and indispensable condition, constitute the class, in which the hopes of a real elevation of humanity may be placed. In such a society, no very perfect adaptation is possible. The border-line between each caste, becomes a territory where the contiguous classes act and react upon one another, where different influences produce new forms, and where the danger of stability is successfully and repeatedly resisted and overcome. It is an organism containing in its constitution the guarantee, almost, of heterogeneity. Like warmed water, it has strata, and currents continually running through those strata. * G.E., p. 223. In such a society, the very condition of unstable equilibrium, of ill-adaptedness, gives rise to a striving spirit which might be exploited and guided by the legislator to the benefit of the ideal race. In such a society, complete adaptation would have to be regarded as the devil himself, since it would be the arch-enemy of the spirit of ascent actuating the conduct of its greatest heroes. In such a society, Nietzsche says, the higher men might beget Superman, and it is for this society that he would legislate. Hear his exhortation unto Higher Men:— "O my brethren, I consecrate you to be, and show unto you the way unto, a new nobility. Ye shall become procreators and breeders and sowers of the future. "Verily, ye shall not become a nobility one might buy like shop-keepers, with shop-keepers' gold. For all that hath its fixed price is of little value. "Not whence ye come be your honour in future, but whither ye go! Your will, and your foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves, — be that your new honour! "O my brethren, not backward, shall your nobility gaze, but forward! Expelled ye shall be from all fathers' and forefathers' lands! This is Nietzsche's taste in Sociology. There are other tastes, all equally possible. There's the taste for the herd — the socialistic taste; there's the taste for a Man-God — absolute monarchy; there's the taste, too, for Anarchy. To define Nietzsche's system of Sociology in a sentence, would be to call it an oligarchy, led onward by an ideal type of man, which the higher caste is ever trying to realise and surpass. The aristocracy, in this society, must not be the pusillanimous mob that bowed and kowtowed to Louis the Fourteenth of France, or, to go further back, to many of the Roman Despots. "The essential thing, in a good and healthy aristocracy," says Nietzsche, "is that it should not regard itself as a function, either of the kingship or of the commonwealth, but as the significance and the highest justification thereof — that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely, that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select-class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general, to a higher existence. . . ." † And Nietzsche does not despair, even of the shallow- * Z., "Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 12. † G.E., p. 225. * G.E., p. 225. Mr Chesterton says somewhere, I believe it is in a review of Dr Oscar Levy's book, The Revival of Aristocracy, that the oligarchic does not need the same manly hardness as the democratic state, and I believe he gives as his reason, that democracy presupposes the "desire to be master" in each individual, whereas oligarchy grants this master's spirit only to the few and the select. It seems never to have occurred to Mr Chesterton, that in Democracy no real struggle for mastership ever takes place at all, that, under it, there is much less of a desire to rule, than a desire to further his own pretty personal interests, in the individual. Once these have been reasonably furthered, what is the experience of most legislators? — the interest of the private individual in legislation suddenly wanes and, very quickly, vanishes completely away. Spencer in his Reflections at the end of his Autobiography confesses that he must, however reluctantly, admit this to be so, * and his refusal to sit for Parliament was based to a large extent on considerations of this nature. No, what the units of a herd most earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage and hardness towards one's self, that control of one's self which all good commanders must have, * Autobiography, Vol. II. p. 468. Also see pp. 202 and 466. Now, responsibility, insight, nerve, courage, hardness, are disturbing, they are moreover not necessarily bound up with the individual gregarian's private interests, therefore they are not coveted by him. What he covets is smug ease — and every time some influence threatens to thwart this wretched complacency, he suddenly develops an interest for legislation; then, indeed, for a space, he will wish to be master. Hardness? — He knows nothing of the hardness that can command his heart, his mouth and his hand, before it attends to the command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knows this hardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and unsignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knows this hardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake of a mess of pottage; — if this is the hardness Mr Chesterton refers to, then we are with him; the gregarious man and future socialist has this so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment, — so have all parasites and silent warm-gnawers at the frame-work of great architecture. "In every healthy society, three types, mutually conditioning and differently gravitating, physiologically "Nature, not Manu, separates from one another the mainly intellectual individuals, the individuals mainly excelling in muscular strength and temperament, and the third class neither distinguished in the one nor in the other, the mediocre individuals, — the latter as the great number; the former as the select individuals. "The highest caste — I call them the fewest — has, as the perfect caste, the privileges of the fewest: it belongs thereto to represent happiness, beauty, goodness on earth. Only the most intellectual men have the permission to beauty, to the beautiful; it is only with them that goodness is not weakness . . . the good is a privilege. On the other hand, nothing can be less permissible to them than unpleasant manners, or a pessimistic look, an eye that makes deformed, — or even indignation with regard to the entire aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; and pessimism similarly. 'The world is perfect' — thus speaks the instinct of the most intellectual men, affirmative instinct; 'imperfection, every kind of inferiority to us, distance, pathos of distance, even the Chandala belongs to this perfection.' The most intellectual men, as the strongest, find their happiness in that in which others would find their ruin: In the labyrinth, in severity towards themselves and others, in effort; their delight is self-overcoming: with them asceticism becomes naturalness, requirement, instinct. A difficult task is regarded by them, as a This concludes Nietzsche's description of his ideal society. In examining his morality as we shall now proceed to do, it will be well to bear this description carefully in our minds. Of a very large percentage of those who misunderstand and misjudge him, I think it may safely be said, that they have omitted to do this; for it is quite impossible not to see the consequential * C.W., pp. 339–342. At the very zenith of the reign of Christian values upon earth, under the auspices of the religion of pity, two philosophers, unknown to each other in person, one English, and the other German, began to write upon morals; — each in his own way; each with a wish to help his fellows; each, possibly, with the notion that the hospital atmosphere of modern Europe was becoming intolerable. The results arrived at by the one, we knew as early as 1879, the other's works we are only now beginning to read in England. Herbert Spencer was the one, Friedrich Nietzsche was the other. This is what Spencer said:— "We regard as good the conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad, the conduct tending to self-destruction." * Those of you who recall Nietzsche's conclusions as stated in the first paper, will perceive that Spencer's moral principle is plainly, and in a sense, inevitably, but a half-statement of the actual fact underlying all moralities. I say inevitably, since it is in complete harmony with his views, that Life is Activity, or that it is "continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." We have seen, however, that life is more than that; that the will to preserve self is but an indirect consequence of a still higher will: the will to acquire power for self. * Data of Ethics, p. 25. True, when we examine Spencer's works closely, we do indeed see that he has an ideal of a sort: a kind of glorified industrial, possessed with almost transcendental powers for the production of useful things; it is an ideal suggested to him by the ordinary man of his time, and, even so, we remark a painful lack of outline and form in the type desired; since the "survival of the fittest" is urged as a process whereby he will be attained to. With this stress which Spencer lays upon the bald principle of the survival of the fittest, * we begin to suspect what, all along, has been our fear in the study of his philosophy, and that is, its almost total lack of taste. Spencer, the man who could seriously contemplate the possibility of "setting up a systematic manufacture of designs for textile fabrics printed or woven, as well as for paper hangings and the like," † does not surprise us therefore, when, in his attitude towards the * Principles of Sociology, Vol. III. p. 599. Principles of Biology, Vol. II. p. 532. † Autobiography, Vol. I. p. 309. It will be remembered that, overlooking his own very strict principle that the survival of the fittest does not necessarily imply the survival of the more desirable, in any respect (if we give this word anything like its ordinary meaning) — and, therefore, that the course of evolution, followed by a species, does not of necessity mean an ascent or an improvement, he states his moral principles more definitely as follows:— "The conduct to which we apply the name good, is the relatively more evolved conduct; and bad is the name we apply to conduct which is relatively less evolved." * The inconsistency here requires no comment. Be all this as it may. Spencer and Nietzsche are, in some details, so very much alike, and each, in his way, was gifted with such extraordinary mental powers, that I should have been loath to juxtapose them here in such sharp contrast, were it not for Nietzsche's own tribute to our great philosopher, wherewith he practically suggests a comparison. In the Genealogy of Morals, you remember, he says, after having reviewed other systems of ethics and found them worthless: "How much more reasonable is Mr * Data of Ethics, p. 25. We have seen why he could not sanction Spencer's moral philosophy; in the first place, because its principle was so general that it promised to rear no very definite type, and therefore revealed a total want of taste; secondly, because the very nebulous hints of the ideal to which it might attain, betray a taste so essentially opposed to his, that to accept it meant to join the ranks of his worst enemies — the decadents. † Turning from these considerations in order to consult Nietzsche's moral philosophy, let us see what it is he says. He who knew and remembered that the law of the "survival of the fittest" is no guarantee that a desirable type (in his sense) will ultimately survive, provided the values by which it progresses be values of decadence and degeneration, gives us the code with which he would rear his ideal man, the moral code which leads his way, expresses his taste, and accords with his reading of the face of Nature. "What is good? — All that increases the feeling of power, will for power, power itself in man. "What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness. "What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases — that resistance is overcome. "Not contentedness, but more power; not peace at any price, but warfare, not virtue, but capacity (virtue * G.M., p. 20. † C.W., p. 202. "The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our charity. And people shall help them to do so. "What is more injurious than any crime? — Practical sympathy for all the ill-constituted and weak — Christianity." * This is the morality of power, of healthy life, of Optimism, with which Nietzsche wished to make his ideal man paramount. It is the antithesis of everything we think we are most certain about to-day; it is the antithesis, perhaps, of everything we are most uncertain about to-day. Its author partly divined the kind of reception moral values of this stamp would receive at the hands of the effeminate manhood of Europe. He was prepared to be reviled; he foresaw the host of misunderstandings to which his code would probably give rise. And, indeed, the agitation of the herds, and the fright of the various bell-wethers, soon found violent expression. In the third part of Thus Spake Zarathustra we see that he had anticipated the most likely form their attack would take. "O my brethren," he cries, "say, am I cruel? But I say: What is about to fall, shall even be pushed. "The all of to-day — it falleth, it decayeth. Who would keep it? But I — I will push it down besides! "Know ye the voluptuousness that rolleth stones * C.W.,p. 242. "A prelude I am of better players, O my brethren! An example. Act after mine example! "And him you do not teach to fly, teach — how to fall more quickly!" * To see through the smug and miserable humbug of the present, the humbug that still rejoices in a clean conscience, and put an end to it; that is what he would have us do. But, in the first place, let us be quite clear as to who it is who is really selfish and cruel, which morality actually contains the values of cruelty and brutality — Nietzsche's or the Christian's? Often enough has his been lightly credited with them, and by men who ought to know better. Any man's criticism is, however, only a comment, a sidelight, on himself. When somebody tells us that he dislikes Strauss or Raeger, we hear nothing which may either destroy or confirm our opinion of these two musicians; but we certainly receive a very broad hint in regard to the character, taste and education of the man expressing the opinion. Likewise, when Mr Chesterton rashly asserts that Nietzsche preaches egoism, † we receive no real information concerning Nietzsche, we are, rather misinformed; but, we are given a valuable comment on Mr Chesterton himself, and that is, that he has neither read Nietzsche carefully nor troubled to understand the little he did read of him. * "Z., Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 20. † "Orthodoxy," p. 65. On inquiring into the question a little more profoundly, however, we may be surprised to find the case somewhat different from what we at first expected it to be. According to our ideas, the desirable life of a shrub, a tree, or a breed of dogs, is maintained only by a process of selection and sacrifice. Our process is more deliberate, not perhaps so stealthy and haphazard as Nature's; we sacrifice the individual for the ideal we have of the family: we sacrifice the family for our ideal of the species, and often we have annihilated the species for our ideal of the genus. The gardener prunes the fruit and rose trees. He has an ideal tree in his mind, to which he strives to make the trees under his care attain; therefore he is an enemy of all frail, sickly and degenerate members. The dog-breeder drowns the sickly individuals among a litter of puppies. If the number be excessive for the bitch, and he can find no foster-mother, he sacrifices even promising young dogs, for the sake of the ideal dog-family, which he has in his mind. Life — desirable Life — demands sacrifice, and not sacrifice for a metaphysical point, but, more often, for a physical one. Their ideal man was the man of spirit and combativeness; hence their life was a constant war; even their recreations were strenuous struggles — even their conversations were disputes. "The humble man of the Christian," says Mr Bury, "would have been considered a vicious and contemptible person by Aristotle, who put forward the man of great spirit as the man of virtue." * Sacrifice — the conscious self-sacrifice for an ideal, which we are now discussing — cannot of course be numbered among the Greek concepts. They were, first of all, men of action and spirited action. But we must not forget that it is possible for an activity which is quite unconscious to achieve a result which a conscious artistic effort could only approximate. We must remember that a peacock may excel the greatest master of deportment that the world has ever known, in the way it deports itself. Unconscious artists, then, these Greeks merely vented a pressure within them, which craved expression of some sort; that this pressure led to heroism and valiant deeds of self-sacrifice was just as incidental to their purpose as the voluptuous grace of a tiger is to his act of walking, or to his crouch before he springs. Their purpose, above all, was to rid themselves of their superfluous spirit. It is not sufficiently understood yet, that all real artists, whether they paint, sing, write or com- * History of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. I. p. 23. Some painters say, "observe and interpret masses of form and colour, masses of light and shade, the line and definition of your picture will then evolve of themselves." That some of us, on regarding a picture produced in this way, should imagine that the line and definition in it are the result of the artist's conscious effort, is comprehensible enough. The end achieved is too often confounded with the means employed in achieving it. The Greeks were not heroes from choice; — they were unconscious, artistic heroes. Forgetting the worth of life in deeds of heroism, owing to the fact that they were concerned only with the still greater worth of performing what were to them natural and necessary actions, they give us at least the picture of a people striving cheerfully after lofty and spirited ideals. When we have understood that these ideals were merely incidental, we have not thereby reduced the beauty of the deed, we have made it a thousand times It is only when we descend to a state of effete culture, or to a state of mixed hopes and conflicting aims, in which spirit has to be summoned, marshalled and gathered, that we can begin to talk of conscious heroism and conscious self-sacrifice. And although to-day we still have a vestige of the old unconscious ideal left, still, we are living at a time when ideals must be consciously striven after, and in which heroes must mostly be exhorted. Nietzsche realised the necessity of a modern Peter the Hermit. He saw that the ideal race to which the Greeks unconsciously attained, and which made them the greatest artists the world has ever had, as their sculpture is with us to prove, — he saw that this ideal of race must be deliberately striven after to-day, there must be a deliberate mustering, marshalling and directing of forces, a conscious pruning, suppression and elimination of weakness, until, in the course of several generations, those qualities which must now be willed, become incorporated and instinctive; until they become as unconscious as they were in the ancient Greeks, and thus acquire that purity and stability which characterise unconscious beauty alone. This principle of Nietzsche's, which, if we banish squeamish prejudices, we know to be our principle also, is simply the old time-honoured law, that some one, some few must suffer, if an ideal race is to be attained to at all. Now, how does the so-called altruistic morality of Christianity face these questions? In the first place, as Mr Bury says, "Christianity emphasised the privileges, hopes and fears of the individual, Christ died for each man." † "'Immortality' granted to every Tom, Dick and Harry, has hitherto been the worst, the most vicious outrage on noble humanity — and let us not underestimate the calamity which, proceeding from Christianity, has insinuated itself even into politics. At present nobody has any longer the courage for separate rights, for rights of domination, for a feeling of reverence for himself and his equals, — for pathos of distance. ‡ And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity, — it has thereby enticed over to its side all the ill-constituted, the seditiously-disposed, the ill-fortuned, the whole scum and dross of humanity. 'Salvation of the soul' — means, in plain words, 'the world revolves around me.'" § * C.W., p. 230. See also remarks on Hedonism in the second paper. † History of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. I. p. 33. ‡ C.W., pp. 306, 307. § Ibid., p. 306. Mr Bury actually goes so far as to attribute the disintegration of the Roman Empire, partly to this baneful centralisation of interests in each individual, to the extinction of an ideal of manhood on earth. Every human creature that succeeds in filling his lungs with air, be he botched or beautiful, sick or sound, becomes sanctified through this preservative notion of "soul," and must be maintained, — even though an ideal of race ultimately becomes impossible, even though mankind ultimately assumes the appearance of the collected patients of all the world's hospitals and infirmaries, — even though the noble plants get stifled under the matted mass of tares that grow about them. As a matter of fact, however, Christianity knows no tares. The word was once used metaphorically by the Founder of the Creed; but its application to humanity seems to have become obsolete. No, — every sprout is a noble plant, — every blade must be nurtured, fostered and pampered, until the healthy begin to doubt whether it is right or even holy to be as they are; till everyone is either an invalid or an invalid's attendant, until the human world becomes, as we see it to-day, more than two-thirds botched, patched and bungled. This is genuine selfishness; this is selfishness caught napping — or else nothing is right, nothing is true, nothing is worth while. Formerly, the heroic ideal was, that sacrifice is a worthy deed, when performed for the ideal of one's race or genus. Christianity not only altered the motive of the deed, by offering a post-mortem reward for it; but, in the narrow Christian view, even the deed itself shrank, and became an action of pity for one's neighbour, of love for one's friends. Schopenhauer consistently made pity the greatest virtue; but, obviously only because his philosophy denied life and was thoroughly nihilistic. To-day, pain must, above all things, be avoided; the individual must survive; the ideal race is a secondary, a minor — in any case — a much less significant — factor in life. We are all alike before God. "And base things of the world, and things which are despised has God chosen; yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are." Nietzsche's teaching was called egoism; — by how many, I wonder, who understood this passage:— "Uncommon is the highest virtue, and of little use; shining it is and chaste in its splendour: a giving virtue is the highest virtue. "Verily, I believe I have found you out, my disciples: ye seek, like me, after a given virtue. . . . Ye compel all things to come unto you and into you, in "Verily such a giving love must become a robber as regardeth all values; but I call that selfishness healthy and holy. "There is another selfishness, a very poor one, a starving one which ever seeketh to steal; the selfishness of the sickly, sickly selfishness. "With a thief's eye it looketh at all that glittereth; with the crowing of hunger it measureth him who hath plenty to eat; and it ever stealeth round the table of givers. "Disease speaketh in that craving, and invisible degeneration; of a sick body speaketh the thief-like craving of that selfishness. "Tell me, my brethren: what regard we as the bad and the worst thing? Is it not degeneration? — And we always suspect degeneration wherever the giving soul is lacking. "Upwards goeth our way, from species to superficies. But a horror for us is the degenerating mind which saith: 'All for myself!'" * The sick and impotent man, in Nietzsche's opinion, is the one who must, of necessity, be selfish, and must be unjustifiably so. He has nought to give; he must take from the sound and the powerful if he wish to maintain himself. Giving, when it is compatible with the survival of the giver, means superabundance. "The excess of power only, is the proof of power." † The Greeks, the natural artists, giving from super- * Z., "Of the Giving Virtue." † C.W., p. 97. The fulness of life, overflowing life, is distinctly conducive to the act of giving; in fact, Nietzsche does not think it at all impossible that even the custom of sacrificial offerings may partly have arisen from the desire to bestow, which superfluity provokes. "A proud people needs a God in order to sacrifice," he suggests. * What seem to be strains of pure egoism, certainly do run through Nietzsche's teaching; but let us hear his own words upon the matter:— "Selfishness," he says, "has as much value as the physiological value of him who possesses it: it may be very valuable, or it may be vile and contemptible. Each individual may be looked at with respect to whether he represents an ascending or a descending line of life. When that is determined we have a canon for the valuation of his selfishness. If he represents the ascent of the line of life, his value is in fact very great — and on account of the collective life which in him makes a further step, the concern about his maintenance, about providing his optimum of conditions, may even be extreme. . . . If he represents descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, or sickening, he has little worth [his egoism then amounts to the will to maintain his kind, therefore to the will to degeneration] and the greatest fairness would have him take away as little as possible from the well-constituted. He is then no more than a parasite." † * C.W., p. 258. † C.W., pp. 192, 193. And is it supposed that an egoist wrote these words?:— "Thus willeth the tribe of noble souls: they wish not to have anything for nothing, least of all life. "Whoever is of the mob, will live for nothing. But we others unto whom life gave itself, — we are wondering what we shall best give in return! "And verily, this is a noble speech, that saith: 'The promises life maketh unto us, we shall keep!' "One shall not wish to enjoy one's self where one doth not give enjoyment." * Not egoism, but broad, grand altruism, is the kernel of Nietzsche's philosophy. In wishing to disabuse our minds of the illusion that our petty unselfishness, gentleness, and pity are of any real worth; in crying: "Alas, where in the world have greater follies happened than with the pitiful. And what in the world hath done more harm than the follies of the pitiful;" † he certainly led the superficial to suppose that selfishness was the aim and mainspring of his teaching. But, he says in this respect, we are all too short-sighted, and living, as it were, too much from day to day. The far-sighted one sees greater and more weighty duties than the love of his neighbour. The generation of the future, their health and their welfare press heavily upon him, and he is terribly conscious of * Z., "Of Old and New Tables, ¶ 5. † Z., "Of the Pitiful." "Do I counsel you to love your neighbour? I rather counsel you to flee from your neighbour and to love the most remote. "Love unto the most remote future man, is higher than love unto your neighbour. "It is the more remote [your children and your children's children] who pay for your love unto your neighbour. * "Your children's land ye shall love (be this love your new nobility!), the land undiscovered in the remotest sea! For it I bid your sails seek and seek! "In your children ye shall make amends for being your father's children. Thus ye shall redeem all that is past! This new table I put over you!" † But, for this ideal of Nietzsche's, we must be harder and more tenacious than we are. The weakness of our present sentiments must reveal its folly to us, and, if we have the far-sighted gaze, we must see that it is dangerous folly. I have already spoken, somewhat at length, on this question of hardness. I tried to show, in opposition to Mr Chesterton, that it was precisely the prerequisite of an oligarchy, in which commanders are commanders from force of temperament and character. All of you who have tried at one time or other to command others, even if these others have been but little children, must have learned how completely and utterly * Z., "Of Love for One's Neighbour." † Z., "Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 12. This hardness, we are fast losing to-day. Softer and more degenerate qualities are taking its place, and pity is the coping-stone of them all. Pity — that attitude towards our fellow-creatures, which, as you know, all of us, individually resent most bitterly, when it is directed at us; pity which makes us recoil when it is breathed upon us even by our best friend; — this is the quality which is fast becoming the greatest virtue amongst us; it was, as we saw in the last lecture, the device upon the shields of all slaves, invalids and pygmies. With it they elevated themselves. We feel there is something debasing in it. Whatever we may say in its support, we know it is ignoble — or, if we don't, why, pray, do all those amongst us who have any taste for courage, independence and nobility of spirit, resent and resist it with all our might? "What is more injurious than any crime?" he asks. "Practical sympathy for all the ill-constituted and weak — Christianity." That we may be fit to found Nietzsche's society, he would perforce have us harder. "Ye higher men, think ye that I live to make well what ye made badly? "Or think ye that I meant to pillow you sufferers more comfortably for the future? Or to show new and easier footpaths unto you restless, gone astray on roads and mountains? Nay! Nay! Three times Nay! Ever more, ever better ones of your tribes shall perish. For ye shall have ever a worse and harder life. Only thus — "Only thus man groweth up unto that height where the lightning striketh and breaketh him; high enough for the lightning! "Towards few things, towards long things, towards remote things, my mind and my longing turn. What concern hath your petty, manifold short misery for me! "Ye do not yet suffer enough! For ye suffer from yourselves, ye have never yet suffered from man. "Ye would lie, did ye say otherwise! None of you suffereth from what I have suffered." † In a race, like ours, in which changes are slow to show themselves, in which the life of one individual is * Z., "Of the Pitiful." † Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 6. It ought to be clear now, that his preaching of the Gospel of hardness, is no idle satisfaction of a cruel lust in his nature; it is rather the action of one who would help us to fight our way up to a more dignified type. "When ye despise what is agreeable and a soft bed, and know not how to make your bed far enough from the effeminate: then is the origin of your virtue." † "Zarathustra was a friend of all such as make distant voyages and like not to live without danger." ‡ For this hardness; for this will to love only one's children's land, we must first of all develop a will. The lack of will, and the disease of it, where it does exist, is at the bottom of our effeminacy in Europe to-day. We must learn the firmness of purpose which distinguishes good commanders, or the intelligence and honesty to admit that we can be but followers. Those who cannot command must seek their signifi- * Z., "Of the Tree on the Hill." † Z., "Of the Giving Virtue." ‡ Z., "Of the Vision and the Riddle." "Thou callest thyself free? . . . "Art thou such a one as to be permitted to escape a yoke? Many there are who threw away everything they were worth when they threw away their servitude. "Free from what? How should that concern Zarathustra? Clearly thine eye shall answer: free for what. "Canst thou give thyself thine evil and thy good, hanging thy will above thee as a law? Canst thou be thine own judge and the avenger of thine own law? "Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one's own law." * The promises we make unto ourselves, we must learn to keep. If we cannot keep our word to ourselves, how shall we hope to be commanders? We are then only followers still. Self-command is the first step of all commanding. "Many a one can give rules to himself [and make lofty resolutions]; but there lacketh much in his obeying them!" † "Oh, that ye understood my word: 'Be sure to do whatever ye like, — but first of all be such as can will!'" ‡ With the future of mankind, alone, in our minds, with the possibility of Superman earnestly and completely realised, we unconsciously project our gaze over and beyond the heads of our fellows. Our purpose lies somewhere behind our present horizon; we must be * Z., "Of the Way of the Creator." † Z., "Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 4. ‡ Z., "Of the Belittling Virtue." Such a purpose, with the means it exacts, will develop those qualities in us which will ultimately lead us to regard our present hypersensitiveness and readiness to re-act to the slightest stimulus, as conditions of disease, as states of sickness. We must cease asking ourselves what we would be free from; our question must be: what would we be free for? "Beyond-man is my care; with me, he and not man is the first and only thing. Not the neighbour, nor the poorest one, not the greatest sufferer, not the best one. "O my brethren, what I can love in man, is that he is a transition and destruction, and even in you there are many things that make me love and hope. "For to-day, the petty folk have become master. They all preach submission and resignation and policy and diligence and regard and the long etcetera of petty virtues "These ask, and ask, and weary not with asking: "How doth man preserve himself best, longest and most agreeably? Thereby they are the masters of to-day. Surpass these masters of to-day, O my brethren, the petty folk. They are the greatest danger for Superman! "Surpass, ye higher men, the petty virtues, the petty policies, the grains-of-sand-regards, the swarm- Now, perhaps, we are beginning to see more clearly into Nietzsche's so-called egoism. We no longer shudder at the apparent hardness of his words; his inclemency becomes austerity, his love for mankind appears grander and deeper than ours. His severity is really the noblest compassion. We know now what he means when he says:— "Unto the incurable, one shall not go to be physician. But more courage is requisite for making an end than for making a new verse. That is known unto all physicians and poets." † "Life is hard to bear. But do not pretend to be so frail. . . . What have we in common with the rose-bud that trembleth because a drop of dew lieth on its body? ‡ "What is good? — All that increases the feeling of power, will to power, power itself, in man. "What is bad? — All that proceeds from weakness." We now see the necessity of these words, we now see how inevitable they are, if we are to achieve Nietzsche's ideal. "There is no harder lot in all human fate, than when the powerful of the earth are not at the same time the first men. There everything becometh false and warped and monstrous. § "For my brethren what is best shall rule; what is * Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 3. † Z., "Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 17. ‡ Z., "Of Reading and Writing." § Z., "Of the Conversation with the Kings," ¶ 1. With this new table reigning, Nietzsche assures us that things will be more cheerful, more tasteful, on earth. Man's smile will no longer be spasmodically checked and turned to a grimace when he bows his head to glance at his fellows and their lot. Pain the inevitable concomitant of all becoming, of all birth, will be accepted as a necessary factor in existence. The scurry to avoid it will cease, and man will halt at his Noon, at his Great Mid-day, in order to scan the land of his child — the Superman, which will lie remotely on the horizon — bright in the glow of the afternoon sun. Perhaps this ideal seems vain, over-strained — dreamy? It may even raise a laugh among those who have perhaps never observed the changes that are possible, even in a single life, if high ideals, instead of base ones, are striven after. But Nietzsche does not tell you to expect the realisation of your ideal to-morrow or the next day. He says:— "Not yourselves, perhaps my brethren! But ye could create yourselves into fathers and fore-fathers of Superman, and let this be your best creating." † "What hath hitherto been the greatest sin on earth? Was it not the word of him who said: 'Woe unto those who laugh here?' "Did he himself find no reasons for laughing on earth? If so, he sought but ill. A child findeth reasons here ‡ * Z., "Of Old and New Tables," ¶ 21. † Z., "On the Blissful Islands." ‡ Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 16. "Since man came into existence, he hath had too little joy. That alone, my brethren, is our original sin! † "How many things are still possible! Learn, I pray, to laugh beyond yourselves! Raise your hearts, ye good dancers, high! higher! And forget not the good laughter! "This crown of laughter, the crown of rose-wreaths — unto you, my brethren, I throw this crown! The laughter I have proclaimed holy. Ye higher men, learn how to laugh!" ‡ * Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 18. † Z., "Of the Pitiful." ‡ Z., "Of Higher Man," ¶ 20. |
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