Nietzsche
[This essay on Nietzsche was recently found among the posthumous papers of Professor Royce. It will perhaps appear strange to many that the author of The Duties of Americans in the Present War and of The Hope of the Great Community should have found so much, not merely of interest, but of sound doctrine — ‘matter for the strengthening of hearts’ — in the philosopher now claimed by modern Germany as its prophet and oracle. In reply it can only be said that modern Germany, and not Nietzsche, is at fault. Professor Royce’s thesis is that only as a prophet of the soul, the portrayer of an ideal, is Nietzsche to be understood. The revolt which he preaches is not so much a revolt against others as against the self, against the narrow or commonplace or merely habitual self in the interests of ideal selfhood. And in a sense it may be said that the rigid Weltpolitik of modern Germany is the antithesis of the philosophy of Nietzsche. For all politics or statecraft is relative to a stereotyped world, and with such a world Nietzsche has nothing in common, — ‘All this is poverty and a miserable ease,’ — and the hour that he exalts is the hour ‘in which not only your happiness but your reason and virtue as well become your loathing.’ — W. FERGUS KERNAN.]
I
To many of his readers Nietzsche is simply a writer of aphorisms that express his passing moods. He is a skeptic from this point of view concerning all ultimate truths. On occasion, as his own words indicate, he doubts altoget her the value of truth. Life is experience or activity. Man lives to express himself, not to conform to something not himself. As a fact, there are expressions of Nietzsche which are distinctly in this spirit. But to others of his readers and commentators Nietzsche is the expositor of a system. The difficulty of maintaining this thesis is the difficulty of extracting from his aphorisms any one consistent whole doctrine. Consequently, those who go to Nietzsche for positive teaching of permanent thought vary greatly in their interpretation of what is fundamental for his thought.
The freedom of the writer of aphorisms is not only dangerous in itself, but misleading to the reader who is in search of permanent instruction such as he can restate or apply. We in America have been trained more or less in dealing with precisely such problems as this by the cases of our own Emerson and of Walt Whitman. Emerson at one time influenced Nietzsche very deeply. With Walt Whitman he has not a few features of ideal and of doctrine in common. But in any case, like both Emerson and Walt Whitman, Nietzsche feels perfectly free to follow the dialectic of his own mental development, to contradict himself, or, as Walt Whitman said, ‘to contain multitudes.’
On the other hand those misinterpret Nietzsche entirely who conceive the prime motive of his teaching as sensualism, or as the love of self-indulgence, or as pride, or as any form of merely self-centred narrowness. He is an individualist, without question. His ideal of life belongs among the many wellknown forms of ethical Titanism. To judge him fairly you must bear in mind your Byron or your Goethe, or any other of the numerous writers who have expressed the purpose of life in terms of the conflict between the free individual and the world of convention, of tradition, or of destiny. Faust, Cain, Manfred, and the other heroes of individualism in the literature of ideals, must first come to mind, that one may see to what vast constellation this star of Nietzsche’s belongs; although one would go wrong, and seriously wrong, if one identified the ideal or the problem of Nietzsche with those which these names suggest. The interest of the man lies just in the fact that he is not merely an individualist, but a very original one, adding to the well-known forms of the Titanic ideal a distinctly new one.
The central motive of Nietzsche seems to me to be this. It is clear to him that the moral problem concerns the perfection, not of society, not of the masses of men, but of the great individual. And so far he, indeed, stands where the standard of individualistic revolt has so often been raised. But Nietzsche differs from other individualists in that the great object toward which his struggle is directed is the discovery of what his own individuality itself means and is. A Titan of the type of Goethe’s or Shelley’s Prometheus proclaims his right to be free of Zeus and of all other powers. But by hypothesis Prometheus already knows who he is and what he wants. But the problem of Nietzsche is, above all, the problem, Who am I? and, What do I want? What is clear to him is the need of strenuous activity in pressing on toward the solution of this problem. His aristocratic consciousness is the sense that common men are in no wise capable of putting or of appreciating this question. His assertion of the right of the individual to be free from all external restraints is the ardent revolt of the strenuous seeker for selfhood against whatever hinders him in his task. He will not be interrupted by the base universe in the business — his life-business — of finding out what his own life is to mean for himself. He knows that his own will is, above all, what he calls the will for power. On occasion he does not hesitate to use this power to crush, at least in ideal, whoever shall hinder him in his work. But the problem over which he agonizes is the inner problem. What does this will that seeks power genuinely desire? What is the power that is worthy to be mine?
Nietzsche’s contempt for popular morality is, therefore, only to be understood as a hatred for the spiritlessness, for the submissiveness, and, as he sometimes adds, for the treachery that seeks to avoid conflict, to escape from life’s strenuous task, and to use the wiles of the morality of pity and human kindliness as a means for disarming the stronger and for leveling life to the commonplace. But it is unfair to interpret the austere, the unpitiful, the stern elements of Nietzsche’s ethical doctrine, as themselves the expression of his central interest. If he is unpitiful he is so, most of all, toward himself. If he makes light of human suffering, it is above all of his own suffering that he has made light. In seeking self-expression, mastery, might, he is seeking something above all internal, perfectly consistent with the utmost sensitiveness to the pathos of life, and to the needs of humanity. If Nietzsche would sacrifice ordinary human interest and lives to the higher individuality, it is his first purpose to appeal to individual men as they are to sacrifice themselves to this higher selfhood. In the often-quoted introductory speech of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to the people, this view of the ideal is expressed in classic form.
‘ What is the greatest thing ye can experience? That is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which not only your happiness but your reason and virtue as well become your loathing. The hour in which ye say, What is my happiness worth? . . . The hour in which ye say, What is my reason worth? Longeth it for knowledge as a lion for its food? It is poverty and a miserable ease. The hour in which ye shall say, What is my virtue worth ? It hath not yet lashed me into rage. How tired I am of my good and mine evil! All that is poverty and a miserable ease. The hour in which ye shall say, What is my justice worth? I do not see that I am flame and fuel. But the just one is flame and fuel. The hour in which ye shall say, What is my pity worth? Is pity not the cross to which he is being nailed who loveth men ? But my pity is no crucifixion. Spake ye ever like that? Cried ye ever like that? Alas! Would that I had heard you cry like that! Not your sin, your moderation crieth unto heaven.’
In this sense Nietzsche’s doctrine is unquestionably not merely an individualism. Even against his will his doctrine, as soon as articulated, has the universality of a Kantian categorical imperative. Nothing is worthy of expression but the ideal individuality. Therefore the first task of every human being is indeed to revolt against tradition, but still more to revolt against his own narrowness and pettiness of sentiment, and to prepare for a sacrifice of what is dearest to his sentiment in order that he may thereby win through strenuous activity the discovery of what that higher ideal individual is to mean.
It is in the light of these considerations that we are able to get the most general perspective of Nietzsche’s ethical doctrine. The values of life are internal values. In your heart are the issues of your own life. Whoever has inflicted upon you the law from without has degraded your moral individuality. If you have accepted this law merely as it came to you, and because it came to you, you are one of the slaves. You are the mere material to be used up in the process of humanity’s higher growth. And the morality of Nietzsche treats you, in so far as you are contented with your lot, or are willing to remain the slave of your ethical destiny and of your religious tradition, with aristocratic contempt.
But does his appeal awaken you, then you are one of those who may take part in the task of aiming toward the higher individuality. You then become conscious that your will is the will for power. But the power that you desire is not mere earthly despotism. It is self-possession. You do not possess this power unless you are able to endure any degree of suffering and sacrifice of sentiment for the sake of discovering your meaning and your selfhood. Woe unto those that are at case in this new Zion! Nietzsche’s virtue has this at least in common with Christian charity, that it suffereth long, even if it appears rather unkind. Unsparing you are, but least of all do you spare what is commonplace about yourself. ‘Ye have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once ye were apes; even now man is ape in a higher degree than any ape. Behold, I teach you beyond man.’
II
Of all Nietzsche’s writings the book called Thus Spake Zarathustra is evidently the most frequently read, though also in some respects the most mysterious and the most in need of a commentary. Nietzsche’s choice of a name for his ideal hero has nothing to do with an effort to paraphrase or to imitate the teachings or the personality of the Persian Zoroaster, whose name is thus employed. Zarathustra has in common with the Persian seer the tendency to think out his doctrine in solitude. The original Zoroaster notoriously made use of the fundamental contrast between a good and an evil principle. Nietzsche’s Zoroaster is to overcome on a higher level the very oppositions on which the original doctrine of the Persian depended. These considerations, together with a good many oriental associations and the general desire to depict the career of the founder of a new faith, are responsible for the choice of the hero’s name. Zarathustra is in part an idealized Nietzsche, in part the type of a hero whose existence must be conceived as a dim future possibility, for which the humanity of to-day is not worthily prepared. Long years of loneliness separate him from human kind. Communion with the secrets of nature, and with his own heart, has given him a higher wisdom. The negative part of this wisdom is summed up in the first article of his creed, namely, that God is dead; and that man has to live on the earth and under earthly conditions without any of the hope with which an older supernaturalism had surrounded his life. The positive aspect of this creed is summed up in the first place in the doctrine of the Superman.
The Superman is defined sometimes as an inevitably coming being, a product such as the doctrine of evolution requires us to anticipate. He will not come on earth as a result of any miracle. He will be related to man as man now is to the apes. The senselessness of our present human existence is justifiable only as a transition stage on the way to the Superman. ‘Man,’ says Zarathustra, ‘ is a something that shall be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass him?’
But Nietzsche has no means of giving a scientific proof that the Superman must come. Nor as a skeptic is he able at all permanently to maintain the theoretical probability of any one outcome of the evolutionary process rather than another. The Superman frequently appears simply as what he is, namely, an ideal, the vision of the individual that should be. That he will come to exist we know not. But our wills shall say, Let him come to existence. By this ideal we give sense to our life. And because the Superman is an ideal and not a definitely expected product of a nature process, the sense that this ideal gives to our lives comes through an imitation of this deliberately created concept of the perfect individual, but still more through a determination restlessly to labor upon the task of creating the concept.
The follower of Zarathustra has, therefore, no one fixed gospel preached to him. He must learn the dream and the interpretation thereof. Or, rather, he must learn, as it were, the art of heroic dreaming, and the art of living beyond every dream to a still higher ideal. Discontent is thus the constant accompaniment of Zarathustra’s life and doctrine, But it is not a dreary discontent. Although it involves much suffering, it is a glorious, and, above all, a self-confident discontent. In the Heraclitean world of the higher individuality, where all is in flow, there appears at first to be nothing permanent but the law of the search.
Yet beyond all the seeking Zarathustra desires in the end, indeed, to define the law of life in terms that shall not be subject to the endless flow. Like Heraclitus, Zarathustra hopes to find what is permanent about this search for the higher individuality in the form of an absolute law to which all the apparently endless changes of the individual in the search for his ideal shall be subject. And the definition of this absolute law occurs to him in terms which had acquired a strange and decidedly fantastic significance in the mind of Nietzsche. There was an hypothesis with which Nietzsche evidently played for years and which also obviously had a somewhat pathological tendency to beset his imagination. This was the hypothesis, well known to human imagination ever since Pythagorean days, of the fatal tendency of the world to a precise repetition after long cycles of all its changes, of all its conflicts, ideals, evolutionary processes, and individual occurrences. The notion that countless times this precise thing has happened before, occurred to the Pythagoreans in ancient Greek thought, for reasons which probably had something to do with astronomical observations and astrological speculation. This notion became an important part of Nietzsche’s own teaching, and of that of Zarathustra, because of its relations — relations not by any means superficial or insignificant — to his conception of the ethical problem. Seldom has a purely fantastic freak of the imagination stood in a more interesting relation to a profound problem of the formulation of an ethical ideal.
Zarathustra has at once to follow and to define the ideal. The ideal is that of the perfect individual. The perfect individual is to be self-contained, a law unto himself, no follower of God or of man, no recognizer of any rule that is imposed upon him from without. Yet the perfect individual is to be in no sense a seeker for self-indulgence, his existence is through and through strenuous. His every act is a transition. He cares not whether such act proves even to be a self-destruction, if only he may escape from lower ideals. The one thing that he cannot tolerate is commonplaceness, vulgarity, or mere content with convention, with tradition, with circumstance. Yet Nietzsche is equally conscious, and Zarathustra with him, that the higher life must be, not only a striving, but an experience; not only strenuousness, but an accomplishment; not only an endless spiritual agility, but an enjoyment of perfection; not only a heroism, but a self-possession. For were the higher life not all of these things, wherein would consist the meaning of the struggle, since neither heavenly joys nor the will of the gods, neither Nirvana nor the beatific vision, can be admitted into the doctrine to give purpose to life? If this infinite flow has not its meaning beyond itself, in heaven, or in that slavish service of mankind which Zarathustra condemns, and yet if at every stage of the process one finds nothing but a passing on to the next, what is the significance of the whole process?
The answer to this question is given in terms of the fantastic hypothesis of the eternal recurrence of every event in the world, and thus the hypothesis in detail asserts that life in its wholeness, with all its struggles expressed, with all its fate completely worked out, with all its individuality finally embodied, is present, not only once, but endlessly numerous times, in the course of infinite time. The idea thus suggested, mystical as it essentially is, is Nietzsche’s equivalent in his closing period for what the religious consciousness had formerly sought in the conception of a divine plan of the universe. The conception is mystical because Nietzsche can grasp it only by intuition, and can give only the most insufficient reason for his belief. It appeals to him partly because it is unconventional, is no article of a traditional faith, and appears consistent with a purely naturalistic view of things, and with the existence of a world of rigid law. It is comforting to him as well as terrible. On the one hand, it comes to him with a pathological insistence and forms part of his suspicious attitude toward life. It is conceived as a blind necessity inflicting itself upon the world-order. On the other hand, the same thought long dwelt upon becomes at length pleasurable. One had feared it, because it seemed to make all endeavor vain. One accepts it in the end because it somehow assures us that all the problems of life are worked out and have been worked out endlessly often heretofore.
In the ceaseless change to which both experience and our self-criticism expose us, we look in vain for a final state for the sake of which life may exist and in the light of which it may be justified. Nietzsche’s thought is that the justification of life must be the whole of life, for life is everywhere a passage from less to greater, or from problem to partial solution, or from the outworn to the new. In the whole circle of the worldlife, granted only that the circle is a closed one, every possible transition from a lower to a higher, every possible facing of a problem, every possible transition from old to new must have been accomplished.
In the mysterious conversation with his own spirit which Zarathustra typifies as a meeting with a certain dwarf who personifies all his own weakness and temptation, Nietzsche’s ideal hero thus narrates his view of the meaning of the eternal recurrence. The dwarf of the story, Zarathustra’s baser self, scorning his aspiration, whispers, ’Thou stone of wisdom, thou throwest thyself high up, but every stone thrown must fall. Condemned unto thyself and thine own stoning, O Zarathustra, far thou threwest the stone indeed, but it will fall back upon thyself.’ That is, in substance, this restless idealism, this search for the absolute individuality, is self-defeating. The task has to begin always afresh. One finds not the complete self. And in Zarathustra’s world there is no God in whom the self should find its goal. The Sisyphus task of seeking the perfect is essentially vain. And thus the tempter dwarf expresses what is indeed the obvious problem of every untrammeled individualism.
‘But,’ Zarathustra tells us, ‘a thing is within me — I call it courage. It hath hitherto slain every evil mood of mine. This courage bade me at last stand still and say, “Dwarf, thou or I”; for courage is the best murderer, courage that attacketh. For in every attack there is the stirring music of battle. — “Halt, dwarf,” said I, “ I am the stronger of us two. Thou knowest not mine abyss-like thought. Thou couldst not endure that.” Now there happened to be a gateway where we had to stop. “Look at this gateway, dwarf,” I said. “It hath two faces; two roads meet here, the ends of which no one has ever reached. This long lane back, it stretcheth out for an eternity. And that long lane out there, it is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads (the past and the future), and here at this gateway they meet. The name of the gateway standeth written above — Present Moment. But whoever would go along either of them and ever further and ever more remote, believest thou, dwarf, that these roads contradict each other eternally ? — From this gateway called Moment a long eternal lane runneth backward. Behind us lieth an eternity. Must not all that can run of things have run already through this lane? Must not what can happen of things have happened, have been done, have run past here already? And when everything has already existed, what dost thou, O dwarf, think of this moment? Must not this gateway already have been there? And are not all things so fast linked together that this moment draws after itself all coming things, and so does not it draw itself also after itself? For what can occur in this long way before us? It must once more occur. And this slow-moving spider that creeps in yonder moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in the gateway whispering together about eternal things, must we not all have already existed? And must we not come again and run our course in that other lane, out there before us in that long-haunted lane?’
The thought thus expressed is ambiguously stated so far as concerns its significance for the speaker. The vision of the conversation with the dwarf is at once one of terror and of courage. In characteristic fashion Zarathustra opposes to the thought of the tempter, that all is vanity because nothing can be accomplished, the other thought that all which is possible has already been numberless times accomplished. But this thought, too, suggests vanity. The striving soul demands novelty. The individual shudders before this abyss of fate which yawns at his feet. Yet, as Nietzsche frequently says, it is the business of man to stand upon the edge of abysses and to learn not to fear them. The reaction from this terror at the haunted way of life comes when one remembers that the closed circle of eternal life is one of significant striving, and that therefore the very closing of the circle involves the completion of the striving. The wanderer in life’s wilderness sees no shining light of an eternal city beyond him. His home is in wandering. He has not the romantic sentimentality, but he certainly has the deep restlessness of the hero of Schubert’s Wanderer’s Song. Nietzsche will have him learn courage and absolute endurance in his wandering. And the courage is to result from the very facing of this most abysmal thought, that the wandering as a whole is one completed expression of an endlessly restless, but still in each of its cycles perfectly self-expressed, life.
With this thought in mind Nietzsche thenceforth is able to speak of eternity as his delight and his goal. The deepest problem of life becomes the attainment of sufficient courage to endure the hardships of the world-cycle, knowing that by just this series of struggle the complete life has to be expressed. If this moment has its fixed place in the cycle that expresses the whole meaning of life, then one can return to a delight in the present for its own sake, which will reconcile the strenuousness of Nietzsche’s ideal with the joyousness, with the naivete in accepting experience, which is also one of his essential motives. The joy of life returns when one has become convinced that the goal of life is not something utterly undetermined, but absolutely predetermined.
The lesson of the experience has also for Nietzsche its general aspect. His constant teaching is, if you have any insistent horror, conquer it by facing it and thinking it out. If fate besets you, make what seems fate also appear to you as your own deed. If you have any evil thought, make it a part of your free self by expressing once for all its whole meaning. Do not suppress your weaknesses. Build your strength upon them. It is with the painful, as it is with the so-called evil element of your nature. It is to be won over to the service of perfection even by being fearlessly accepted, worked out, and thereby conquered.
III
The two doctrines, that of the Superman and that of the eternal recurrence, constitute the central contents of the creed of Zarathustra. You do not know what the concrete purpose in life of the Superman will be if ever he comes to exist, but you already begin to work his will in seeking for him. In attempting to define his purpose you raise the whole question, so fundamental in our actual life, of the meaning and purpose of individual existence. Nietzsche differs from traditionalism of all kinds, and agrees, I should say, with the loftiest idealism, when he declines to accept his ethical individual as something whose character is for us men now predetermined, or to be accepted ready made. Those who say that the ideal character has already been embodied, that what I am to be is predetermined by the example of some preceptor or master, find no support from Nietzsche. In this respect, I should say, Nietzsche is indeed at one with the very idealism whose philosophical expression, as it had been attempted in earlier German thought, he so vigorously rejected. Herein lies his highest value as a stimulating critic of life; and that value, as I must repeat, allies him to Emerson, to Walt Whitman, and to other apostles of a higher liberty and assailants of a stereotyped ideal. For Nietzsche there is no one way of salvation except the way of being different from every other individual and complete in yourself.
There is no doubt that, from the point of view of a more systematic idealism, Nietzsche appears as entirely failing to see the organic character of the true life of coöperating individuals. The great problem of reconciling the unique individual with the world-order is simply not Nietzsche’s problem. One must not go to him for light upon that subject. Therein lies his perfectly obvious limitation. Yet there is no doubt, from the point of view of any deeper idealism, that this grave problem can be solved only upon the basis of the clearest knowledge, precisely that upon which Nietzsche insists — namely, the uniqueness of the life of every individual and the genuineness of the duty of every soul to seek its own type of salvation. That its own type of salvation will as a fact involve a higher coöperation with all other individuality, is indeed true, and it is a truth that you cannot learn from Nietzsche. But I do not object to the musician because he is unable to carve for me statues or to build me cathedrals. Nietzsche understands that the art of life is the struggle, the endeavor, the courage, and incidentally the delightfulness of experience which enables the free soul in its best moments to take delight in the very tasks that its skepticism and its self-criticism seem to make so endless, and in one aspect so hopeless. Be dissatisfied with yourself, and yet assert yourself. Believe nothing, and yet have courage in the midst of your very suspicions, and cultivate your intuitions even while suspecting them: these are some of Nietzsche’s precepts. And whoever comprehends their problem of individuality will thank him for them.
In the light of this essentially fluent conception of the Superman much that is paradoxical in Nietzsche’s expression becomes in general intelligible. He notoriously calls himself an immoralist. But by morality he means conventional morality. And his contention is in this respect not different in principle from the well-known contention of Kant, according to which what Kant calls heteronomy is ethically intolerable. What will can I follow but my own? The ethical problem is to find out what my will is. Nietzsche, indeed, rejects every statical concept of the content of the ideal. Any finished creed as to what an individual ought to be at once arouses his spiritual repugnance. He is up and away long before any such ideal can be sufficiently expressed to win even a fair hearing. What we have called the spiritual agility of the self as Nietzsche conceives it forbids the acceptance of any such static ideal.
‘ My brother, when thou hast a virtue, and it is thy virtue, thou hast it in common with nobody. To be sure, thou desirest to call it by name and to caress it and to amuse thyself with it. And lo! thereupon thou hast its name in common with the people. Thou hast become people and herd with thy virtue. Better were it if thou shouldst say, Unspeakable and nameless is that which maketh my soul’s pain and sweetness, and that is mine inmost hunger. I desire it not as God’s law. I desire it not as man’s statute and necessity. It shall not point me the way to another world or paradise. It is an earthly virtue that I love. Once thou hadst passions and didst call them evil; now hast thou only thy virtues. They grew from thy passions. For by thee thine own highest ideal was instilled into these passions and thereupon they became thy virtues and thy delight; and though thou wert from the stock of the choleric, or of the voluptuous, or of the fanatical, or of the vindictive, at last all thy passions grew virtues, and all thy devils angels. . . . And from this time forth nothing evil groweth out of thee unless it be the evil that groweth out of the struggle of thy virtues.’
In the Zarathustra, from which I quote these words, there now follows a characteristic passage concerning the struggles and the mutual jealousies of precisely the virtues that have been thus characterized. And the picture of triumph and of inner selfhood that has just been suggested is at once clouded by the observation that every such relative state of inner perfection is in us transient, dialectical, self-destructive. The immediate conclusion is, ‘Man is something that must be surpassed. And therefore love thy virtues; for thou shalt perish from them.’
The other and fantastic thought of the eternal recurrence—that thought which we have just expounded— is, as one now sees, the almost inevitable counterpart and foil of this conception of the endless search for individuality. Rejecting every form of absoluteness except such as seems to him consistent with necessary laws of nature and with the endless flow of things, Nietzsche still needs the restful pole in the flight of phenomena of which Schiller speaks. He quite as much needs something eternal and dividing, to give significance to his struggle for individuality, as he would need if he were a devout believer in traditional creeds.
Nietzsche’s fantastic thought is, however, much deeper than its mere appearance would suggest. As a fact, a concept of ethical individuality must be just to the endless pursuit of goals of which every strenuous life consists. It must also be just to our requirements that there shall be a finished ideal despite the fact that you cannot find anywhere in the series of life’s facts the expression of this ideal in a static form. It must also be just to the consideration which so many religions have neglected, namely that the true goal of life is the whole of life and not any one point in it — the conquering of defects by their inclusion in a richer life, and not an excision of ills from life. The deepest question of an ethical idealism is the problem whether life in any sense constitutes a significant whole, and whether this wholeness has a determinate and individual character.
Now Nietzsche is well aware of this problem. It can be solved neither by the theory that there is, once for all, a substantial individual soul having its permanent static character which our ideal life merely portrays in successive deeds, nor yet by the doctrine that the moral law is something merely static or abstractly universal. The individual and significant wholeness of our life must depend upon something which is not now completely expressed, but which, on the other hand, is in no sense a static substance, but something now in the making. The whole meaning of life turns upon the question whether our life in its entirety constitutes one drama. And in Nietzsche’s Godless world of natural necessity the concept of eternal recurrence is the sole means by which he can conceive this unity of life’s plan. With this in mind he can become, as he says, eager for eternity.
‘ If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea’s kin; and if I am fondest of it when it contradicteth me angrily; if that seeking desire is within me that driveth the sails after what is yet undiscovered; if there is a sailor’s joy in my joy; if my rejoicing hath ever cried, “The shore has disappeared; now the last chain hath fallen down from me. The limitless roareth around me. Far away time and space shine beyond me! Upwards and onward, my heart!" Oh, how could I fail to be eager for eternity and for the marriage ring of rings, the ring of the eternal recurrence? ’
IV
As we turn now to the less poetical productions, namely the Genealogy of Morals, and the Beyond Good and Evil, we reach works that are very easily misunderstood if one lays stress upon their more obvious and paradoxical expression. The Genealogy of Morals has been absurdly emphasized in some of the more popular and hostile criticisms passed upon Nietzsche. In the light of his fundamental interests in the problem of the genesis of the free individual, the paradoxes of this work become indeed comprehensive enough. Its purpose is to free men from the bondage of the merely conventional morality. This purpose is to be accomplished by means of a psychological interpretation of the history of the moral consciousness. Full of the whimsical and the paradoxical is this account. Act the paradoxes in question are by no means novel in the history of thought. They are in part the well-known paradoxes of the Sophists in the Platonic dialogues. In part they are common to the assailants of sentimental religious faith generally.
Moral distinctions have, according to Nietzsche, a twofold origin in the history of the human mind. They are distinctions made by the noble, the strong, the consciously superior, the aristocratic. Or, on the other hand, they are the distinctions made by the weaklings, by the fearful, by the slaves. The distinctions of the first class are themselves in no wise static, infallible, or for Nietzsche necessarily acceptable. But their type as they appear in the history of thought is the higher of the two types. For the noble souls become self-conscious by virtue of their superiority. Life is everywhere the will to attain might. The strong know that what they want is good, and that they can attain that good, at least in some measure, by reason of their strength. Moreover, the desire to rise above the mass grows. For how shall the highest be attained, unless the higher themselves are ready to rise? And how should the good be won through the mere nourishing of the weaklings? The strong man may be, indeed, kindly and courteous and humane. But he is so because that is his strength and his choice, his way to embody his will in the world, and not because the weak desire him to do so. The stronger souls consequently make their distinction between the noble and the base, the good and the contemptible. Upon this basis arises the Herren Moral. Strongly opposed to this is the Sklaven Moral, whose historical monument is Christianity.
Nietzsche abounds in paradoxes when he discusses the faith that lies nearest to his own early training and that had obviously most deeply influenced much of his sensibility. The weaklings cannot express themselves by their own force. They have developed in the course of history the art of persuading the strong as well as themselves that weakness itself is a virtue, and that all that the weak need ought to be given them by the strong. The result of such morality has been the glorification of the commonplace, the stupid, the spiritless, and the brokenhearted.
The doctrine thus indicated in the briefest way occupies in Nietzsche’s own mind a place that, can be understood only in the light of the central and positive character of his individualism. There is here no historically accurate estimate of Christianity; and much of the onslaught upon its teachings involves many of the trivialities of negative liberalism — trivialities which only the brilliancy of Nietzsche’s literary skill, and the actually wonderful insight of many of his psychological comments, can make tolerable to any one really accustomed to true liberality of thought.
As a fact, Nietzsche’s own individualism has had its place in the history of Christian doctrine. There is no question of the shallowness of a great deal of what is called altruism, and of the dangerous tendency toward the commonplace which a conventional Christian morality has frequently involved. But there is that in the original Christian ideal which is not at all foreign to the spirit of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Yet the value of this whole discussion, as well as of another work, the so-called Anti-Christ, which Nietzsche wrote just before his final collapse, lies not at all in its value as a fair historical estimate of anybody’s faith, but only in its significance as a series of paradoxical illustrations of Nietzsche’s central problem, the problem of the perfect individual selfhood.
The other, and in some respects the more highly organized and significant of his later expressions outside the Zarathustra, namely the Beyond Good and Evil, contains the following notable and deliberate statement of Nietzsche’s view of virtue in general.
Our virtues? It is probable that we too (namely we so-called immoralists) still have our virtues. We Europeans of to-morrow, we firstlings of the twentieth century, with all our dangerous curiosity, our manysidedness, our art of disguising we probably, if we still are to have virtues, shall have only such as best agree with our most secret, our most heartfelt longing, with our most ardent needs. And so then let us seek for them in our own labyrinths, labyrinths wherein, as everybody knows, so much is lost and lost forever. And is there anything nobler than seeking for one’s own virtues? And we too in our own way are men of duty. To be sure, sometimes we indeed dance in our chains — oftener, it is also true, we gnash our teeth in our bonds and are impatient because of all the secret painfulness of our fate. But, do what we will, the stupid and the look-of-things will agree in declaring that we are men who know no duties. We have always the stupid and the look-of-things against us.
It has been my effort in the foregoing to give some of the impressions of the sense in which these duties can exist for Nietzsche and of the reason why nevertheless he can appear as rebel against convention, as opponent of the faith, as immoralist, as teacher of paradoxes, as austere and self-asserting individualist. As a fact, it is not selfishness in its narrower sense; it is certainly not sensualism. It is still less any sort of supposably scientific outcome of Darwinism that characterizes Nietszehe. He is not a partisan of mere self-will. His ideal is not merely that of brute force.
Nor yet is it fair to say with Dr. Tille, his translator, that physiological perfection, or the power to survive, is in any sense for him the expression of the ideal. He proclaims the significance of health, but it is healthful vigor of will that he is thinking of, much more than athletic skill or any externally visible character. His paradoxes constantly insist upon the virtue of power and upon the possession of power as the sum of virtue, but the power of which he is thinking is inner power. He despises the commonplace virtues, but that is a whimsical way of expressing his love of absolute perfection. He cannot define what his absolute perfection is, but no one has better expressed in recent times than he the ideal of the search for a consciousness of perfection. He glorifies the aristocratic self; but the self of which he speaks turns out to be an invisible and ideal self, as unseen as is the risen and ascended Lord of the ancient faith; as much an object of service as was ever the God against whom Nietzsche revolted.