Anthony M. Ludovici

“ Now, seeing that mankind is undoubtedly moulded by the nature of the values which prevail over it, it is manifestly of paramount importance to the philosopher to know which order of values conduces to rear the most desirable species of man, and then to advocate that order, with all the art and science at his disposal.
Nietzsche saw two lines of life: an ascending and a descending line. At the end of the one he pictured an ideal type, robust in mind and body, rich enough in spirit and vigour to make giving and bestowing a necessary condition of its existence ”

“ Thus it was the condemnation of modern values, together with the thought of man's being able to surpass himself, which gave Nietzsche the grounds and the necessary strength for abandoning pessimism and embracing that wise optimism which characterises the whole of his works after The Joyful Wisdom.
True, God was dead; but that ought only to make man feel more self-reliant, more creative, prouder. Undoubtedly God was dead: but man could now hold himself responsible for himself. He could now seek a goal in manhood, on earth, and one that was at least within the compass of his powers. ”

“ Nietzsche thought of Reynard the Fox, who, at the very moment that he was about to be hanged, and with the rope already round his neck, succeeded by his dialectical skill in persuading the crowd to release him. For Nietzsche could hear the weary, the wounded, and the incapable of the fight, crying quite distinctly through their lips parched for rest: "Peace is good! Love is good! Love for one's neighbour is good! Ay, and even love for one's enemy is good!" ”

“ Nietzsche clearly saw that if all moral codes are but weapons protecting and helping to universalise distinct species of men, then the Christian religion with its ethical principles could be no exception to the rule. It must have been created at some time and in some place by one who had the interests of a certain type of man at heart, and who desired to make that type paramount. Now if that were really so, the next question that occurred to Nietzsche's mercilessly logical mind was this: "Is the Christian religion, with its morality, tending to preserve and multiply a desirable type of man?" ”

“ In Christian values, Nietzsche read nihilism, decadence, degeneration, and death. They were calculated to favour the multiplication of the least desirable on earth: and, as such, despite his antecedents, and with his one desire, "the elevation of the type man," always before him, he condemned Christian morality from top to bottom. This magnificent attempt on the part of the low, the base, and the worthless, to establish themselves as the most powerful on earth, must be checked at all costs, and with terrible earnestness he exhorts us to alter our values. ”

“ To believe that there is a moral order in the universe is to believe that these unpleasant things in Nietzsche's definition will one day be overcome. This was the position Christianity assumed from the start. Put, though it was excusable in a religion fighting for power, and compelled to use nice and attractive words for its followers, to suppose that all the misery on earth will one day be transformed by God's wisdom into perfect bliss; such an attitude is quite unpardonable in the case of a philosopher or even of a poet. ”

“ How would any other philosophy have fared under such misrepresentation and calumny?
Nietzsche could not believe in equality; for within him justice said "men are not equal!" Those to whom it gives pleasure to think that men are equal, he conjures not to confound pleasure with truth, and, like Professor Huxley, he finds himself obliged to recognise "the natural inequality of men."
But, far from deploring this fact, he would fain have accentuated and intensified it. This inequality, to Nietzsche, is a condition to be exploited and to be made use of by the legislator. ”

“ Is there no aggression without the struggle for existence? Is there no voluptuousness in a position of power for us own sake? Of course there is! And one wonders how these English biologists could ever have been schoolboys without noticing these facts. As Nietzsche points out, however, they are every one of them labouring under the Christian ideal still—in spite of all their upsetting of the first chapter of Genesis, and in spite of all their blasting of the miracles. Put, if life is the supreme aim of all, how is it that many things are valued higher than life by living beings? ”

“ I know them so well that I have the greatest doubts whether Nietzsche's influence will be strong enough to withstand the terrible hurricane of democracy which in our age is sweeping everything before it, and leaving a level plain in its rear. Nietzsche may have been ever so right, but Truth and Righteousness do not always prevail in this world of ours, indeed, they don't: the bible itself, that otherwise optimistic book, lets this grand secret out once and only once—in the story of Job. ”

“ Throughout his life and all his many recantations and revulsions of feeling, he remained faithful to one purpose and to one aim—the elevation of the type man. However bewildered we may become beneath the hail of his epigrams, treating of every momentous question that has ever agitated the human mind, we still can trace this broad principle running through all his works: his desire to elevate man and to make him more worthy of humanity's great past. ”

“ Nietzsche, always eager for a practical and tangible idea, naturally could not accept these two definitions as expressing anything profound about life at all. Looking into the race of nature, and reading her history from the amoeba with its predatory pseudo-podia, to the lion with its murderous prehensile claws, he defined life practically, uprightly, and bravely, as "appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and, at least, putting it mildest, exploitation." ”

“ At the very base of the social edifice, Nietzsche sees the class of man who thrives best when he is well looked after and closely observed,—the man who is happy to serve, not because he must, but because he is what he is,—the man uncorrupted by political and religious lies concerning equality, liberty, and fraternity,—who is half conscious of the abyss which separates him from his superiors, and who is happiest when performing those acts which are not beyond his limitations. ”

“ Nietzsche may have been right, therefore he may be unsuccessful. I myself regard Nietzsche's views on art, religion, psychology, morality, as extremely sound; I think they are proved both by history and by common experience; I even suspect that they could be confirmed by science, if only science would give up looking at the world through the coloured spectacles of democratic prejudice ... but then, it is so difficult to give up this democratic prejudice; for it is by no means simply a political opinion. Democracy, as a political creed, need terrify no one ”

“ In order to be able to provoke so much diversity of opinion, a man must be not only versatile but forcible. Nietzsche was both. There is scarcely a subject in the whole range of philosophical thought which he does not attack and blow up; and he hurls forth his hard, polished missiles in a manner so destructive, and at the same time with such accuracy of aim, that it is no wonder a chorus of ill-used strongholds of traditional thought now cry out against him as a disturber and annihilator of their peace. ”

“ It was all the braver, therefore, on Nietzsche's part to assail such a mighty enemy, and to attack him exactly on the spot where attack was most needed, if victory were to be won. Nietzsche clearly recognised that the canons of criticism had until now only been directed against the outer works of that stalwart fortress—at dogmatic, at supernatural, at ecclesiastical Christianity, and that no one had yet dared to aim right at the very heart of the creed— its morality, which, while the shamfighters were at work outside, was being enormously strengthened and consolidated from within. ”

“ Now, how does Nietzsche stand out from the ranks of almost all other philosophers? By the fact that he was throughout his life an "Advocate of Higher Man." Whereas other philosophers and scholars had always thought they had some divine message to impart in the cause of the "greatest number"; Nietzsche—the typical miner and underminer—believed that his mission was to stand for a neglected minority, for higher men, for the gold in the mass of quartz. ”

“ He is good who is amenable, kind, unselfish, meek, and submissive; that is why, in all communities where slave morality is in the ascendant, a "good fellow" always suggests a man in possession of a fair modicum of foolishness and sentimentality.
The creator of slave-morality was one who, out of the poverty of his soul, transfigured all he saw and heard, and declared it smaller, meaner, and less beautiful than it appeared to the creator of the master values. ”

“ For it is values, values, and again values, that mould men, and rear men, and create men; and ignoble values make ignoble men, and noble values make noble men! Thus it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, truth without end—for men.
Nietzsche realised "all that could still be made out of man, through a favourable accumulation and augmentation of human powers and arrangements" ”

“ Nietzsche puts his linger on the very centre of the question of egoism, he simply says: "Not every one has the right to be an egoist. Whereas in some egoism would be a virtue, in others it may be an insufferable vice which should be stamped out at all costs." ”

“ But the pity which most of us understand as a virtue in Europe to-day, is merely a sort of sickly sensitiveness and irritability towards pain, an effeminate absence of control in the presence of suffering, which has nothing whatever to do with our powers of alleviating the misery we contemplate, and which is only compatible either with excessive sentimentality or with weak and overstrained nerves. In that case all it does is to add to the misery of this world, and to elevate to a virtue that which is perhaps one of the saddest signs of the times. ”

“ For Nietzsche's great forerunner on the Continent, Wolfgang Goethe, who was also just as well aware how it would all end, was much too prudent a man to lay his innermost heart bare to his enemies, he—the grand old hypocrite of Weimar—gauged the power of the contrary current correctly, and wisely left the open combat against Christianity and democracy to his great colleague—to that man of tragic wit, to Heinrich Heine. ”

“ If it could be proved that these Christian values had been created by a noble species with the object of perpetuating that species, then Christianity would come forth from the inquiry vindicated to the hilt, and fill the damage done to its dogma would not have deterred Nietzsche from standing by it and upholding it to his very last breath. ”

“ Nietzsche reminds us before we start, however, [1] that in most communities the two moralities have become so confused and mingled, in order to establish that compromise which is so dear to the hearts of the peaceful, that it would be almost a hopeless task to seek any society on earth in which they are now to be seen juxtaposed in sharp contrast. Be this as it may, in order to recognise the blood of each when we come across it, we have only to think of what must have occurred when the ruling caste and the ruled class took to moralising. ”

“ We shall see that Nietzsche did not hesitate to accept this conclusion, and that if for a moment he declared: "No one knoweth yet what is good and what is evil!" the next minute he was asking himself this searching question: "Is our morality—that is to say, the particular table of values which is gradually modifying us—compatible with an ideal worthy of man's inheritance and past?" ”

“ When Nietzsche began to write Europe was suffering from the worst kind of spiritual illness—weakness of will. Everywhere comfort and freedom from danger were becoming the highest ideals; everywhere, too, virtue was being confounded with those qualities which led to the highest possible amount of security and tame, back-parlour pleasures; and man was gradually developing into a harmless domesticated type of animal, capable of performing a host of charming little drawing-room tricks which rejoiced the hearts of his womenfolk. ”