Nietzscheanism

“ If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain. ”

“ Nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation apart—Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. ”

“ The general conception of the world which Nietzsche first reached, however, is different from what most of us are accustomed to, and repels rather than attracts. We think—at least most of us try to think—of reason and intelligence as governing the world, of justice as its law, and of love as its driving force. But Nietzsche is unable to make out either a rational or a moral government of things. Change and undoing overtake all things, even the best and rarest: what is excellent is no more permanent than anything else. ”

“ Nietzsche seeks rather to magnify life by striking the note of a proud and defiant optimism. He claims for the individual limitless rights; and, repudiating all moral ties, asserts the complete sovereignty of the self-sufficing ego. With a deep-rooted hatred of the prevailing tendencies of civilisation, he combines a vehement desire for a richer and unrestrained development of human power. ”

“ Nietzsche knows truth only as a contemptible method of puny spirits to make existence conceivable—a hopeless task! Nietzsche therefore finds morality guilty as a usurper and a tyrant, and he exhorts all esprits forts to shake off the yoke.
We grant that the self should not be the slave of morality ”

“ We must split up the All, unlearn any particular respect for it, bring back feelings we have given to the unknown and the whole, and devote them to things next us, our own things. The All raises ever the old problems, "How is evil possible?" and so on. To speak bluntly, there is no All, the great sensorium or inventorium or storehouse of power is lacking. [63] Nietzsche is thus altogether a pluralist. Such unities as we find are, to him, derived and created things, and lie in a larger sea of the chaotic. This is true not only of the world at large, but of an individual soul. ”

“ An important aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy is brought to light in this discourse. His teaching, as is well known, places the Aristotelian man of spirit, above all others in the natural divisions of man. The man with overflowing strength, both of mind and body, who must discharge this strength or perish, is the Nietzschean ideal. To such a man, giving from his overflow becomes a necessity; bestowing develops into a means of existence, and this is the only giving, the only charity, that Nietzsche recognises. ”

“ For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception. Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought about his sad plight. ”

“ Nietzsche’s writings must be understood in their relation to these circumstances of his life, and as the outcome of a violent revolt against them on the part of an intensely emotional and nervous temperament. His philosophy, consequently, is neither systematic in itself nor expounded in systematic form. It is made up of a number of points of view which successively appeared acceptable to a personality whose self-appreciation verges more and more upon the insane, and exhibits neither consecutiveness nor consistency. ”

“ Now, as already remarked above, there is no danger what- ever of the open acceptance of the Nietzsche philosophy by any considerable number of persons. It is too extreme, too para- doxical, too violent. ”

“ Nietzsche's philosophy, with its intense hatred of Christianity and modern humanitarianism, is scarcely likely to make any large number of converts among us, but if it can compel us to ask ourselves honestly and plainly what the unacknowledged ideals of our civilisation are, and whether they are, after all, capable of being rationally justified, he will have done an infinitely greater service to thought than any founder of sect or school. ”

“ Nietzsche was said to have entirely perverted and led into unwholesome materialistic channels. Now it will be seen from these letters that there was no more outspoken critic of the German Empire and its crude and superficial "Kultur" than Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout his whole life this lonely man fought against his Fatherland and for true enlightenment: for harmony between body and soul, between peoples and races, between authorities and subjects. ”

“ Of this self-training Nietzsche makes much. Men of the type he looks for may heighten courage, insight, hardness, independence, the feeling of responsibility in themselves—they may live differently from the mass now, and will probably find plenty of opposition without seeking it or coming to an actual passage of arms. [66] Nietzsche was aloof from the world of today, and had and has plenty of opposition. Is not his an evil name in the mouths of most men now? ”

“ With the metaphysics and the dogma of Christianity in ruins all around him, therefore, Nietzsche took a step very far in advance of the rationalistic iconoclasts of his age. He attacked Christian morals, and declared them to be, like all other morals, merely a weapon in the hands of a certain type of man, with which that type struggled for power. ”

“ We must concede that Nietzsche possesses a poetic power of oratory; he appeals to sentiment; he is not much of a thinker, not a philosopher, but a leader and a prophet, and as such he stands for the most extreme egoism. Nietzsche attempts to establish the absolute sovereignty of the individual and grants a most irresponsible freedom to the man who dares; and this principle of doing away with moral maxims has made him popular. ”

“ With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma of self-expression and self-glorification. ”

“ But if one ask oneself what the conditions to such an attitude are, one will realise immediately how utterly different Nietzsche was from his ideal. The man who insatiably cries da capo to himself and to the whole of his mise-en-scene, must be in a position to desire every incident in his life to be repeated, not once, but again and again eternally. Now, Nietzsche’s life had been too full of disappointments, illness, unsuccessful struggles, and snubs, to allow of his thinking of the Eternal Recurrence without loathing—hence probably the words of the last verse. ”

“ The most brilliant author’s introductions I know are those Nietzsche, Poet of Philosophy, has written for books of his epoch-making thinking. No one has been able to throw surer, more far-reaching noose over the problematical future. His Jenseits v. Gut u. Böse he called philosophy of the future. That is daring. It may be true. It is conceivable at least, a world in which good and evil, as we understand them, may not be standardized. Life cast huge shadows for Nietzsche, like childhood’s flickering [131] fireplace-shadows, on the wall. ”

“ It was just such a misapplication of theory Nietzsche tried with his destructive criticism of ideals. He regarded ideals as rampant diseases of the soul of humanity; as indeed they really are. However, in the hands of a good physician who really knows the human soul, who, as Nietzsche says, "has a finger for the slightest shade," who applies the treatment only to what is really diseased in a soul—in such hands both theories prove wholesome caustics. The application must be adapted to the individual case. ”

“ When Nietzsche attempts to make anything definite of his social and political views, to form plans or make forecasts, he is perhaps not more at sea than most thinkers with ideal constructions who are unable to connect themselves with existing tendencies. ”

“ Quite apart from any elements of truth contained in Nietzsche’s ethics, the first reason for his popularity is, no doubt, the perfection of his form and style. Nietzsche is one of the supreme masters of language, in a literature which counts very few masters of language, and the beauty of his style is transparent even in the disguise of a foreign translation. ”

“ The real Nietzsche, undimmed by violent partisanship and equally violent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is he a bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not a constructive or an academic philosopher, but simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker who, because of the nature of his genius, could never have erected an elaborate philosophic system, and a writer not quite as dangerous to established religion and morals as some critics would have us believe. ”

“ And now, gentlemen, we come to the third great intellectual high-kicker, Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I admit, had once a real and valid idea, and his work is built upon that real and valid idea; it is an idea that comes into the head of every intelligent person who grasps the idea of the secular change of species, the idea of Darwinism, in the course of five or six minutes after the effective grasping. This is the idea that man is not final. But Nietzsche was so constituted that to get an idea was to receive a revelation ”

“ In his own heart Nietzsche was much more of a mediaeval saint than a predatory "higher man," but the natural human instinct of any sane and sun-loving pagan may well shrink back dismayed from any contact with this savage "will to power," which, while destroying the quiet cloistered gardens of monastic seclusion, hurls us into the path of these new tyrants. ”

“ If it turns to Nietzsche, however gingerly and suspiciously, it will turn only to fresh disappointment and dismay, for Nietzsche is no quack with another sure cure, but simply an iconoclast who shows that all the sure cures of the past and present have failed, and must fail—and particularly the sure cure of the mob, the scheme of determining the diagnosis by taking a vote, the notion that the medicine which most pleases the grossest palates is the medicine to get the patient upon his legs. Nietzsche is no reformer ”

“ Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. ”

“ Nietzsche does, it is true, refer to the "herd instinct" of the weak, but only to exhibit his very palpable contempt against the weak who herd together so as to be able effectually to combat the strong. A yet further proof of Nietzsche's bitter hatred of the social organism is supplied by the celebrated phrases in Zarathustra, "as little state as possible," and "the slow suicide which we call the state." In our view, however, the real test of Nietzsche's position is touched when we come to the position of the aristocratic strong man. ”

“ Nietzsche and Morality.
In morality, Nietzsche starts out by adopting the position of the relativist. He says there are no absolute values “good” and “evil”; these are mere means adopted by all in order to acquire power to maintain their place in the world, or to become supreme. It is the lion’s good to devour an antelope. It is the dead-leaf butterfly’s good to tell a foe a falsehood. For when the dead-leaf butterfly is in danger, it clings to the side of a twig, and what it says to its foe is practically this: “I am not a butterfly, I am a dead leaf, and can be of no use to thee.” ”

“ The view seems extreme, and yet the very fundamental idea of Nietzsche, that of an order of rank (Rangordnung) , presupposes differences of power, differences usually determined by opposition and conflict—man in his struggle with nature being the grandiose prototype. Even under conditions of civilization one must guard against too much intercourse with the good-natured—for it relaxes: all intercourse is good in which one is armed (not necessarily with a pistol—need I add for the benefit of the simple?) ”

“ He referred to his elite as supermen. He questioned the realization of such a community because of the preponderance of conforming nonquestioning mediocre men. This complacent majority fearful of the different or strange would subdue the possibility of his supermen. Nietzsche did not seem to trust man; he spoke of him as "human, all too human." Unlike Plato, Nietzsche viewed "good" and "evil" as arising from a common source. Man in his humanness, Nietzsche felt, denied his animal heritage and animal qualities. ”

“ Though his prime interest is man and morals, he knows that these subjects cannot be separated from broader and more ultimate ones, and we have his ideas on metaphysics and the general constitution of the world. Poets, "stylists," prophets do not commonly lead others to write about their theory of knowledge,c do not frequently deal, even in aphorisms, with morality as a problem, with cause and effect, with first and last things. Undoubtedly Nietzsche appears inconsistent at times, perhaps is really so. ”