Chapter V: Nietzsche (1)

I

From Spinoza to Nietzsche

Let us dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of only _many_, not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips through this generalization; he is a man of leisure lost in the maze of a puzzle which he has not discovered so much as he has unconsciously constructed it. In Locke’s hands the puzzle is distorted into the question of “innate ideas,” in order that under cover of an innocent epistemological excursion a blow may be struck at hereditary prejudices and authoritarian teaching, and the way made straight for the advance of popular sovereignty (as against the absolutism of Hobbes), free speech, reasonable religion, and social amelioration. The dominance of the social interest is not so easily shown in the case of Leibniz; but let it be remembered none the less that epistemology was but an aside in the varied drama of Leibniz’ life, and that his head was dizzy with schemes for the betterment of this “best of all possible worlds.” Bishop Berkeley begins with _esse est percipi_ and ends with tar-water as the _solution_ of all problems. David Hume, in the midst of a life busied with politics and the discussion of social, political, and economic problems, spares a year or two for epistemology, only to use it as a handle whereby to deal a blow to dogma; he “was more damaging to religion than Voltaire, but was ingenious enough not to get the credit for it.”[121] The social incidence of philosophy in eighteenth-century France was so decided that one might describe that philosophy as part of the explosive with which the middle class undermined the _status quo_. This social emphasis continues in Comte, who cannot forget that he was once the secretary of St. Simon, and will not let us forget that the function of the philosopher is to coördinate experience with a view to the remoulding of human life. John Stuart Mill is radical first and logician afterward; and the more lasting as well as the more interesting element in Spencer is the sociological, educational, and political theory. In Kant the basic social interest is buried under epistemological cobwebs; yet not so choked but that it finds very resolute voice at last. The essence of the matter here is the return of the prodigal, the relapse of a once adventurous soul into the comfort of religious and political absolutes, categorical--and Potsdam--imperatives. Here is “dogmatic slumber” overcome only to yield to the torpor and _abêtisement_ of “practical reason”; here is no “Copernican revolution” but a stealthy attempt to recover an anthropocentricism lost in the glare of the Enlightenment. It dawns on us that the importance of German philosophy is not metaphysical, nor epistemological, but political; the vital remnant of Kant to-day is to be found not in our overflowing Mississippi of Kantiana, but in the German notion of obedience.[122] Fichte reënforces this notion of unquestioning obedience with the doctrine of state socialism: he begins by tending geese, and ends by writing philosophy for them. So with Hegel: he starts out buoyantly with the proposition that revolution is the heart of history, and ends by discovering that the King of Prussia is God in disguise. In Schopenhauer the bubble bursts; a millennium of self-deception ends at last in exhaustion and despair. Every Hildebrand has his Voltaire, and every Voltaire his Schopenhauer.

II

Biographical

“In future,” Nietzsche once wrote, “let no one concern himself about me, but only about the things for which I lived.” We must make this biographical note brief.

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Germany, 1844, the son of a “noble young parson.” He was brought up in strict piety, and prepared himself to enter the ministry; even at boarding-school he was called “the little minister,” and made people cry by his recitations from the Bible. We have pictures of him which show him in all his boyish seriousness; it is evident that he is of a deeply religious nature, and therefore doomed to heresy. At eighteen he discovers that he has begun to doubt the traditional creed. “When I examine my own thoughts,” he writes, “and hearken into my own soul, I often feel as if I heard the buzzing and roaring of wild-contending parties.”[123] At twenty-one, while studying in the University of Leipzig, he discovers the philosophy of Schopenhauer; he reads all hungrily, feeling here a kindred youth; “the need of knowing myself, even of gnawing at myself, forcibly seized upon me.”[124] He is ripe for pessimism, having both religion and a bad stomach. Because of his defective eyesight he is barred from military service; in 1870 he burns with patriotic fever, and at last is allowed to join the army as a nurse; but he is almost overcome at sight of the sick and wounded, and himself falls ill with dysentery and dyspepsia. In this same year he sees a troop of cavalry pass through a town in stately gallop and array; his weakened frame thrills with the sight of this strength: “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”[125] Nevertheless, he settles down to a quietly ascetic life as professor of philology at the University of Basle. But there is adventure in him; and in his first book[126] he slips from the prose of philology into an almost lyrical philosophy. Illness finds voice here in the eulogy of health; weakness in the deification of strength; melancholy in the praise of “Dionysian joy”; loneliness in the exaltation of friendship. He has a friend--Wagner--the once romantic rebel of revolution’s barricades; but this friend too is taken from him, with slowly painful breaking of bond after bond. For Wagner, the strong, the overbearing, the ruthless, is coming to a philosophy of Christian sympathy and gentleness; qualities that cannot seem divine to Nietzsche, because they are long-familiar elements in his own character. “What I am not,” he says, most truthfully, “that for me is God and virtue.”[127] And so he stands at last alone, borne up solely by the exhilaration of creative thought. He has acquaintances, but he puts up with them “simply, like a patient animal”; “not one has the faintest inkling of my task.” And he suffers terribly “through this absence of sympathy and understanding.”[128]

He leaves even these acquaintances, and abandons his work at Basle; broken in health he finds his way hopefully to the kindlier climate of Italy. Doctor after doctor prescribes for him, one prescription reading, “a nice Italian sweetheart.” He longs for the comradeship, but dreads the friction, of marriage. “It seems to me absurd,” he writes, “that one who has chosen for his sphere ... the assessment of existence as a whole, should burden himself with the cares of a family, with winning bread, security, and social position for wife and children.” He does not hesitate to conclude that “where the highest philosophical thinking is concerned all married men are suspect.”[129] Nevertheless he wanders humanly into something very like a love-affair; he is almost shattered with rapid disillusionment, and takes refuge in philosophy. “Every misunderstanding,” he tells himself, “has made me freer. I want less and less from humanity, and can give it more and more. The severance of every individual tie is hard to bear; but in each case a wing grows in its place.”[130] And yet the need of comradeship is still there, like a gnawing hunger: many years later he catches a passing smile from a beautiful young woman, whom he has never seen before; and “suddenly my lonely philosopher’s heart grew warm within me.”[131] But she walks off without seeing him, and they never meet again.

The simple Italians who rent him his attic room in Genoa understand him better perhaps than he can be understood by more pretentious folk. They know his greatness, though they cannot classify it. The children of his landlady call him “Il Santo”; and the market-women keep their choicest grapes for the bent philosopher who, it is whispered, writes bitterly about women and “the superfluous.” But what they know for certain is that he is a man of exceeding gentleness and purity, that he is the very soul of chivalry; “stories are still told of his politeness towards women to whom no one else showed any kindness.”[132] Let him write what he pleases, so long as he is what he is.

He lives simply, almost in poverty. “His little room,” writes a visitor, “is bare and cheerless. It has evidently been selected for cheapness rather than for comfort. No carpet, not even a stove. I found it fearfully cold.”[133] His publisher has made no profit on his books; they are too sharply opposed to the “spirit of the age”; hence the title he gives to two of his volumes: _Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_,--_Thoughts Out of Season_. There is no money, he is now informed, in such untimely volumes; hereafter he must publish his books at his own cost. He does, stinting himself severely to meet the new expense; his greatest books see the light in this way.[134]

He works hard, knowing that his shaken frame has but short lease of life; and he comes to love his painful solitude as a gift. “I can’t help seeing an enemy in any one who breaks in upon my working summer.... The idea that any person should intrude upon the web of thought which I am spinning around me, is simply appalling. I have no more time to lose--unless I am stingy with my precious _half-hours_ I shall have a bad conscience.”[135] Half-hours; his eyes will not work for more than thirty minutes at a time. He feels that only to him to whom time is holy does time bring reward. “He is fully convinced,” an acquaintance writes of him, “about his mission and his permanent importance. In this belief he is strong and great; it elevates him above all misfortune.”[136] He speaks of his _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ in terms of almost conscious exaggeration: “It is a book,” he says, “that stands alone. Do not let us mention the poets in the same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a superabundance of strength.”[137] He does not know that it is his illness and his hunger for appreciation that have demanded this self-laudation as restorative and nourishment. He predicts, rightly enough, that he will not begin to get his due meed of appreciation till 1901.[138] His “unmasking of Christian morality,” he says, “is an event unequalled in history.”[139]

All this man’s energy is in his brain; he oozes ideas at every pore. He crowds into a sentence the material of a chapter; and every aphorism is a mountain-peak. He dares to say that which others dare only to think: and we call him witty because truth tabooed is the soul of wit. Every page bears the imprint of the passion and the pain that gave it birth. “I am not a man,” he says, “I am dynamite”; he writes like a man who feels error after error exploding at his touch; and he defines a philosopher as “a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.”[140] “There are more idols than realities in the world; and I have an ‘evil eye’ for idols.”[141]

What is this philosophy which seemed to its creator more important than even the mightiest events of the past? How shall we compress it without distorting it, as it has been distorted by so many of its lovers and its haters? Let us ask the man himself to speak to us; let us see if we cannot put the matter in his own words, ourselves but supplying, so to speak, connective tissue. That done, we shall understand the man better, and ourselves, and perhaps our social problem.

III

Exposition

1

_Morality as Impotence_

From a biological standpoint the phenomenon morality is of a highly suspicious nature.[142] _Cui bono?_--Whom shall we suspect of profiting by this institution? Is it a mode of enhancing life?--Does it make men stronger and more perfect?--or does it make for deterioration and decay? It is obvious that up to the present, morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met after all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves.[143] But what if morality be the greatest of all the stumbling-blocks in the way of human self-betterment? Is it possible that morality itself is the social problem, and that the solution of that problem lies in the judicious abolition of morality? It is a view for which something can be said.

You have heard that morality is a means used by the strong to control the weak. And it is true: just consider the conversion of Constantine. But to stop here is to let half the truth be passed off on you as the whole; and half a truth is half a lie. Much more true is it that morality is a means used by the weak to control the strong, the chain which weakness softly lays upon the feet of strength. The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.[144] Every one’s desire is that there should be no other teaching and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all times has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of the weak; their chief weapon in this process was the moral principle.[145] Good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts no one, attacks no one, does not take vengeance but hands over vengeance to God; who goes out of the way of evil, and demands little from life; like ourselves, patient, meek, just. Good is to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.[146] Zarathustra laughed many times over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws![147] Obedience, subordination, submission, devotion, love, the pride of duty; fatalism, resignation, objectivity, stoicism, asceticism, self-denial; in short, anemia: these are the virtues which the herd would have all men cultivate,--particularly the strong men.[148] And the deification of Jesus,--that is to say of meekness,--what was it but another attempt to lull the strong to sleep?

2

_Democracy_

See, now, how nearly that attempt has succeeded. For is not democracy, if not victorious, at least on the road to victory to-day? And what is the democratic movement but the inheritor of Christianity?[149] Not the Christianity of the great popes; they knew better, and were building a splendid aristocracy when Luther spoiled it all by letting loose the levelling instincts of the herd.[150] The instinct of the herd is in favor of the leveller (Christ).[151] I very much fear that the first Christian is in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lives and struggles unremittingly for “equal rights.”[152] It is by Christianity, more than by anything else, that the poison of this doctrine of “equal rights” has been spread abroad. And do not let us underestimate the fatal influence! Nowadays no one has the courage of special rights, of rights of dominion. The aristocratic attitude of mind has been most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the equality of souls.[153]

But is not this the greatest of all lies--the “equality of men”? That is to say, the dominion of the inferior. Is it not the most threadbare and discredited of ideas? Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and select classes; everybody equals everybody else; “at bottom we are all herd.” There is no welcome for the genius here; the more promising for the future the modern individual happens to be, the more suffering falls to his lot.[154] If the rise of great and rare men had been made dependent upon the voices of the multitude, there never would have been any such thing as a great man. The herd regards the exception, whether it be above or beneath its general level, as something antagonistic and dangerous. Their trick in dealing with the exceptions above them--the strong, the mighty, the wise, the fruitful--is to persuade them to become their head-servants.[155]

But the torture of the exceptional soul is only part of the villainy of democracies. The other part is chaos. Voltaire was right: “_Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu_.” Democracy is an aristocracy of orators, a competition in headlines, a maelstrom of ever new majorities, a torrent of petty factions sweeping on to ruin. Under democracy the state will decay, for the instability of legislation will leave little respect for law, until finally even the policeman will have to be replaced by private enterprise.[156] Democracy has always been the death-agony of the power of organization:[157] remember Athens, and look at England. Within fifty years these Babel governments will clash in a gigantic war for the control of the markets of the world; and when that war comes, England will pay the penalty for the democratic inefficiency of its dominant muddle-class.[158]

This wave of democracy will recede, and recede quickly, if men of ability will only oppose it openly. It is necessary for higher men to declare war on the masses. In all directions mediocre people are joining hands in order to make themselves master. The middle classes must be dissolved, and their influence decreased;[159] there must be no more intermarrying of aristocracy with plutocracy; this democratic folly would never have come at all had not the master-classes allowed their blood to be mingled with that of slaves.[160] Let us fight parliamentary government and the power of the press; they are the means whereby cattle become rulers.[161] Finally, it is senseless and dangerous to let the counting-mania (the custom of universal suffrage)--which is still but a short time under cultivation, and could easily be uprooted--take deeper root; its introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of temporary difficulties; the time is ripe for a demonstration of democratic incompetence and a restoration of power to men who are born to rule.[162]

3

_Feminism_

Democracy, after all, is a disease; an attempt on the part of the botched to lay down for all the laws of social health. You may observe the disease in its growth-process by studying the woman movement. Woman’s first and last function is that of bearing robust children.[163] The emancipated ones are the abortions among women, those who lack the wherewithal to have children (I go no farther, lest I should become medicynical).[164] All intellect in women is a pretension; when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sex. These women think to make themselves charming to free spirits by wearing advanced views; as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious and ludicrous to a profound and godless man![165] If there is anything worthy of laughter it is the man who takes part in this feminist agitation. Let it be understood clearly that the relations between men and women make equality impossible. It is in the nature of woman to take color and commandment from a man,--unless she happens to be a man. Man’s happiness is “I will,” woman’s happiness is “He will.”[166] Woman gives herself, man takes her: I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract.[167] Indeed, women will lose power with every step towards emancipation. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims. Let her first do her proper work properly (consider how much man has suffered from stupidity in the kitchen), and then it may be time to consider an extension of her activities. To be mistaken in this fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein--he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instincts of Asia.[168]

4

_Socialism and Anarchism_

All this uprising of housekeepers is, of course, part of the general sickness with which Christianity has inoculated and weakened the strong races of Europe. Consider now the more virulent forms of the disease: socialism and anarchism. The coming of the “kingdom of God” has here been placed in the future, and been given an earthly, a human, meaning; but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained. There is still the comforting delusion about equal rights, with all the envy that lurks in that delusion. One speaks of “equal rights”: that is to say, so long as one is not a dominant personality, one wishes to prevent one’s competitors from growing in power.[169] It is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble--it gives them a little intoxicating sensation of power. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation.[170] When you hear one of those reformers talk of humanity, you must not take him seriously; it is only his way of getting fools to believe that he is an altruist; beneath the cover of this buncombe a man strong in the gregarious instincts makes his bid for fame and followers and power. This pretense to altruism is only a roundabout way of asking for altruism, it is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is botched and bungled.[171] In short, socialism is not justice but covetousness.[172] No doubt we should look upon its exponents and followers with ironic compassion: they want something which we have.[173]

From the standpoint of natural science the highest conception of society according to socialists is the lowest in the order of rank among societies. A socialist community would be another China, a vast and stifling mediocracy; it would be the tyranny of the lowest and most brainless brought to its zenith.[174] A nation in which there would be no exploitation would be dead. Life itself is essentially appropriation, conquest of the strange and weak; to put it at its mildest, exploitation.[175] The absence of exploitation would mean the end of organic functioning. Surely it is as legitimate and valuable for superior men to command and use inferior men as it is for superior species to command and use inferior species, as man commands and uses animals.[176] It is not surprising that the lamb should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey.[177] What should be done with muscle except to supply it with directive brains? How, otherwise, can anything worthy ever be built by men? In fact, man has value and significance only in so far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first of all to be solid; he has to be a “stone.”[178]

Now the common people understand this quite well, and are as happy as any of the well-to-do, so long as a silly propaganda does not disturb them with dreams that can never be fulfilled.[179] Poverty, cheerfulness, and independence--it is possible to find these three qualities combined in one individual; poverty, cheerfulness, and slavery--this is likewise a possible combination: and I can say nothing better to the workmen who serve as factory-slaves.[180]

As for the upper classes, they need be at no loss for weapons with which to fight this pestilence. An occasional opening of the trap-door between the Haves and the Have-nots, increasing the number of property-owners, will serve best of all. If this policy is pursued, there will always be too many people of property for socialism ever to signify anything more than an attack of illness.[181] A little patience with inheritance and income taxes, and the noise of the cattle will subside.[182]

Notice, meanwhile, that socialism and despotism are bedfellows. Give the socialist his way, and he will put everything into the hands of the state,--that is to say, into the hands of demagogue politicians.[183] And then, all in the twinkling of an eye, socialism begets its opposite in good Hegelian fashion, and the dogs of anarchism are let loose to fill the world with their howling. And not without excuse or benefit; for politicians must be kept in their place, and the state rigidly restricted to its necessary functions, even if anarchist agitation helps one to do it.[184] And the anarchists are right: the state is the coldest of all monsters, and this lie creeps out of its mouth, “I, the State, am the people.”[185] So the wise man will turn anarchism, as well as socialism, to account; and he will not fret even when a king or two is hurried into heaven with nitroglycerine. Only since they have been shot at have princes once more sat securely on their thrones.[186]

Anarchism justifies itself in the aristocrat, who feels law as his instrument, not as his master; but the rebellion against law as such is but one more outburst of physiological misfits bent on levelling and revenge.[187] It is childish to desire a society in which every individual would have as much freedom as another.[188] Decadence speaks in the democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to rule, the modern _misarchism_ (to coin a bad word for a bad thing).[189] When all men are strong enough to command, then law will be superfluous; weakness needs the vertebræ of law. He is commanded who cannot obey his own self. Let the anarchist be thankful that he has laws to obey. To command is more difficult; whenever living things command they risk themselves; they take the hard responsibilities for the result.[190] Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves;[191] when the mob is capable of that, it will be time to think of dispensing with law. The truth is, of course, that the anarchist is lulled into nonsense by Rousseau’s notion of the naturally good man. He does not understand that revolution merely unlashes the dogs in man, till they once more cry for the whip.[192] Cast out the Bourbons, and in ten years you will welcome Napoleon.

That is the end of anarchism; and it is the end of democracy, too.

The truth is that men are willing and anxious to be ruled by rulers worthy of the name. But the corrupted ruling classes have brought ruling into evil odor. The degeneration of the ruler and of the ruling classes has been the cause of all the disorders in history. Democracy is not ruling, but drifting; it is a political relaxation, as if an organism were to allow each of its parts to do just as it pleased. Precisely these disorganizing principles give our age its specific character. Our society has lost the power to function properly; it no longer rids itself naturally of its rotten elements; it no longer has the strength even to excrete.[193]

5

_Degeneration_

What kind of men is to be found in such a society? Mediocre men; men stupid to the point of sanctity; fragile, useless souls-de-luxe; men suffering from a sort of hemiplegia of virtue,--that is to say, paralyzed in the self-assertive instincts; men tamed, almost emasculated by a morality whose essence is the abdication of the will.[194] Now, as a rule, the taming of a beast is achieved only by deteriorating it; so too the moral man is not a better man, he is rather a weaker member of his species. He is altruistic, of course; that is, he feels that he needs help. There is no place for really great men in this march towards nonentity; if a great man appears he is called a criminal.[195] A Periclean Greek, a Renaissance Florentine, would breathe like one asphyxiated in this moralic acid atmosphere; the first condition of life for such a man is that he free himself from this Chinadom of the spirit.[196] But the number of those who are capable of rising into the pure air of unmoralism is very small; and those who have made timid sallies into theological heresy are the most addicted to the comfort and security of ethical orthodoxy. In short, men are coming to look upon lowered vitality as the heart of virtue; and morality will be saddled with the guilt if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendor of the human species should never be attained.[197]

Men of this stamp require a good deal of religious pepsin to overcome the indigestibility of life; if they leave one faith in the passing bravery of their youth they soon sink back into another.[198] God, previously diluted from tribal deity into _substantia_ and _ding-an-sich_,[199] now recovers a respectable degree of reality; the imaginary pillar on which men lean is made stronger and more concrete as their weakness increases. How much faith a person requires in order to flourish, how much fixed opinion he needs which he does not wish to have shaken, because he holds himself thereby,--is a measure of his power (or more plainly speaking, of his weakness).[200]

The same criterion classifies our friends the metaphysicians,--those albinos of thought,--who are, of course, priests in disguise.[201] The degree of a man’s will-power may be measured by the extent to which he can dispense with the meaning in things; by the extent to which he is able to endure a world without meaning; because he himself arranges a small portion of it.[202] The world has no meaning: all the better; put some meaning into it, says the man with a man’s heart. The world has no meaning: but it is only a world of appearance, says the weak-kneed philosopher; behind this phenomenal world is the real world, which has meaning, and means good. Of the real world “there is no knowledge; consequently there is a God”--what novel elegance of syllogism![203] This belief that the world which ought to be is real is a belief proper to the unfruitful who do not wish to create a world. The “will to truth” is the impotence of the “will to create.”[204] Even monism is being turned into medicine for sick souls; clearly these lovers of wisdom seek not truth, but remedies for their illnesses.[205] There is too much beer and midnight oil in modern philosophy, and not enough fresh air.[206] Philosophers condemn this world because they have avoided it; those who are contemplative naturally belittle activity.[207] In truth, the history of philosophy is the story of a secret and mad hatred of the prerequisites of life, of the feelings which make for the real values of life.[208] No wonder that philosophy is fallen to such low estate. Science flourishes nowadays, and has the good conscience clearly visible on its countenance; while the remnant to which modern philosophy has gradually sunk excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity. Philosophy reduced to a “theory of knowledge,” a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously denies itself the right to enter--that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony; something that awakens pity. How could such a philosophy rule![209]

6

_Nihilism_

All these things, democracy, feminism, socialism, anarchism, and modern philosophy, are heads of the Christian hydra, each a sore in the total disease. Given such illness, affecting all parts of the social body, and what result shall we expect and find? Pessimism, despair, nihilism,--that is, disbelief in all values of life.[210] Confidence in life is gone; life itself has become a problem. Love of life is still possible,--only it is the love of a woman of whom one is doubtful.[211] The “good man” sees himself surrounded by evil, discovers traces of evil in every one of his acts. And thus he ultimately arrives at the conclusion, which to him is quite logical, that nature is evil, that man is corrupted, and that being good is an act of grace (that is to say, it is impossible to man when he stands alone). In short, _he denies life_.[212] The man who frees himself from the theology of the Church but adheres to Christian ethics necessarily falls into pessimism. He perceives that man is no longer an assistant in, let alone the culmination of, the evolutionary process; he perceives that Becoming has been aiming at Nothing, and has achieved it; and that is something which he cannot bear.[213] Suffering, which was, before, a trial with promised reward, is now an intolerable mystery; if he is materially comfortable himself, he finds source for sentiment and tears in the pain and misery of others; he concocts a “social problem,” and never dreams that the social problem is itself a result of decadence.[214] He does not feel at home in this world in which the Christian God is dead, and to which, nevertheless, he brings nothing more appreciative than the old Christian moral attitude. He despairs because he is a chaos, and knows it; “I do not know where I am, or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,” he sighs.[215] Life, he says at last, is not worth living.

Let us not try to answer such a man; he needs not logic but a sanitarium. But see, through him, and in him, the destructiveness of Christian morals. This despicable civilization, says Rousseau, is to blame for our bad morality. What if our good morality is to blame for this despicable civilization?[216] See how the old ethic depreciates the joy of living, and the gratitude felt towards life; how it checks the knowledge and unfolding of life; how it chokes the impulse to beautify and ennoble life.[217] And at what a time! Think what a race with masculine will could accomplish now! Precisely now, when will in its fullest strength were necessary, it is in the weakest and most pusillanimous condition. Absolute mistrust concerning the organizing power of the will: to that we have come.[218] The world is dark with despair at the moment of greatest light.

What if man could be made to love the light and use it?

7

_The Will to Power_

Is it possible that this despair is not the final state in the exhaustion of a race, but only a transition from belief in a perfect and ethical world to an attitude of transvaluation and control?[219] Perhaps we are at the bottom of our spiritual toboggan, and an ascending movement is around the corner of the years. Now that our Christian bubble has burst into Schopenhauer, we are left free to recover some part of the joyous strength of the ancients. Let us become again as little children, unspoiled by religion and morality; let us forget what it is to feel sinful; let the thousandfold laughter of children clear the air of the odor of decay. Let us begin anew; and the soul will rise and overflow all its margins with the joy of rediscovered life.[220] Life has not deceived us! On the contrary, from year to year it appears richer, more desirable, and more mysterious; the old fetters are broken by the thought that life may be an experiment and not a duty, not a fatality, not a deceit![221] Life--that means for us to transform constantly into light and flame all that we are, and also all that we meet with; we cannot possibly do otherwise.[222] To be natural again, to dare to be as immoral as nature is; to be such pagans as were the Greeks of the Homeric age, to say Yea to life, even to its suffering; to win back some of that mountain-air Dionysian spirit which took pleasure in the tragic, nay, which invented tragedy as the expression of its super-abundant vitality, as the expression of its welcome of even the cruelest and most terrible elements of life![223] To be healthy once more!

For there is no other virtue than health, vigor, energy. All virtues should be looked upon as physiological conditions, and moral judgments are symptoms of physiological prosperity or the reverse. Indeed, it might be worth while to try to see whether a scientific order of values might not be constructed according to a scale of numbers and measures representing energy. All other values are matters of prejudice, simplicity, and misunderstanding.[224] Instead of moral values let us use naturalistic values, physiological values; let us say frankly with Spinoza that virtue and power are one and the same. What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and power itself, in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing, that resistance is being overcome.[225] This is not orthodox ethics; and perhaps it will not do for long ears,--though an unspoiled youth would understand it. A healthy and vigorous boy will look up sarcastically if you ask him, “Do you wish to become virtuous?”--but ask him, “Do you wish to become stronger than your comrades?” and he is all eagerness at once.[226] Youth knows that ability is virtue; watch the athletic field. Youth is not at home in the class room, because there knowledge is estranged from action; and youth measures the height of what a man knows by the depth of his power to do.[227] There is a better gospel in the boy on the field than in the man in the pulpit.

Which of the boys whom we know do we love best in our secret hearts--the prayerful Aloysius, or the masterful leader of the urchins in the street? We moralize and sermonize in mean efforts to bring the young tyrant down to our virtuous anæmia; but we know that we are wrong, and respect him most when he stands his ground most firmly. To require of strength that it should express itself as weakness is just as absurd as to require of weakness that it should express itself as strength.[228] Let us go to school to our children, and we shall understand that all native propensities are beneficent, that the evil impulses are to a far view as necessary and preservative as the good.[229] In truth we worship youth because at its finest it is a free discharge of instinctive strength; and we know that happiness is nothing else than that. To abandon instinct, to deliberate, to clog action with conscious thought,--that is to achieve old age. After all, nothing can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously; consciousness is a defect to be overcome.[230] Instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.[231] Genius lies in the instincts; goodness too; all consciousness is theatricality.[232] When a people begins to worship reason, it begins to die.[233] Youth knows better: it follows instinct trustfully, and worships power.

And we worship power too, and should say so were we as honest as our children. Our gentlest virtues are but forms of power: out of the abundance of the power of sex come kindness and pity; out of revenge, justice; out of the love of resistance, bravery. Love is a secret path to the heart of the powerful, in order to become his master; gratitude is revenge of a lofty kind; self-sacrifice is an attempt to share in the power of him to whom the sacrifice is made. Honor is the acknowledgment of an equal power; praise is the pride of the judge; all conferring of benefits is an exercise of power.[234] Behold a man in distress: straightway the compassionate ones come to him, depict his misfortune to him, at last go away, satisfied and elevated; they have gloated over the unhappy man’s misfortune and their own; they have spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon.[235] So with the scientist and the philosopher: in their thirst for knowledge lurks the lust of gain and conquest. And the cry of the oppressed for freedom is again a cry for power.[236]

You cannot understand man, you cannot understand society, until you learn to see in all things this will to power. Physiologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength: self-preservation is only one of the results of this. And psychologists should think twice before saying that happiness or pleasure is the motive of all action. Pleasure is but an incident of the restless search for power; happiness is an accompanying, not an actuating, factor. The feeling of happiness lies precisely in the discontentedness of the will, in the fact that without opponents and obstacles it is never satisfied. Man is now master of the forces of nature, and master too of his own wild and unbridled feelings; in comparison with primitive man the man of to-day represents an enormous quantum of power, but not an increase of happiness. How can one maintain, then, that man has striven after happiness? No; not happiness, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but capacity; that is the secret of man’s longing and man’s seeking.[237]

Let biologists, too, reëxamine the stock-in-trade of their theory. Life is not the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations, but will to power, which, proceeding from within, subjugates and incorporates an ever-increasing quantity of “external phenomena.” All motive force, all “causation” whatever, is this will to power; there is no other force, physical, dynamical, or psychical.[238] As to the famous “struggle for existence,” it seems at present to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception; and it is due not to a desire for food but _à tergo_ to a surcharge of energy demanding discharge. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance, and even of absurd prodigality; where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power. We must not confound Malthus with Nature.[239] One does indeed find the “cruelty of Nature” which is so often referred to, but in a different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the lowly. Darwin sees selection in favor of the stronger, the better-constituted. Precisely the reverse stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the reversion to average, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre. If we drew our morals from reality, they would read thus: the mediocre are more valuable than the exceptional creatures; the will to nonentity prevails over the will to life. We have to beware of this formulation of reality into a moral.[240]

No; morality is not mediocrity, it is superiority; it does not mean being like most people, but being better, stronger, more capable than most people. It does not mean timidity: if anything is virtue it is to stand unafraid in the presence of any prohibition.[241] It does not mean the pursuit of ends sanctified by society; it means the will to your own ends, and to the means to them. It means behaving as states behave,--with frank abandonment of all altruistic pretence. Corporate bodies are intended to do that which individuals have not the courage to do: for this reason all communities are vastly more upright and instructive as regards the nature of man than individuals, who are too cowardly to have the courage of their desires. All altruism is the prudence of the private man; societies are not mutually altruistic. Altruism and life are incompatible: all the forces and instincts which are the source of life lie stagnant beneath the ban of the old morality. But real morality is certainty of instinct, effectiveness of action; it is any action which increases the power of a man or of men; it is an expression of ascendent and expanding life; it is achievement; it is power.[242]

8

_The Superman_

With such a morality you breed men who are men; and to breed men who are men is all that your “social problem” comes to. This does not mean that the whole race is to be improved: the very last thing a sensible man would promise to accomplish would be to improve mankind. Mankind does not improve, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail. To say that the social problem consists in a general raising of the average standard of comfort and ability amounts to abandoning the problem; there is as little prospect of mankind’s attaining to a higher order as there is for the ant and the ear-wig to enter into kinship with God and eternity. The most fundamental of all errors here lies in regarding the many, the herd, as an aim instead of the individual: the herd is only a means. The road to perfection lies in the bringing forth of the most powerful individuals, for whose use the great masses would be converted into mere tools, into the most intelligent and flexible tools possible. Every human being, with his total activity, has dignity and significance only so far as he is, consciously or unconsciously, a tool in the service of a superior individual. All that can be done is to produce here and there, now and then, such a superior individual, _l’uomo singulare_, the higher man, the superman. The problem does not concern what humanity as a whole or as a species is to accomplish, but what kind of man is to be desired as highest in value, what kind of man is to be worked for and bred. To produce the superman: that is the social problem. If this is not understood, nothing is understood.[243]

Now what would such a man be like? Shall we try to picture him?

We see him as above all a lover of life: strong enough, too, to love life without deceiving himself about it. There is no _memento mori_ here; rather a _memento vivere_; rich instincts call for much living. A hard man, loving danger and difficulty: what does not kill him, he feels, leaves him stronger. Pleasure--pleasure as it is understood by the rich--is repugnant to him: he seeks not pleasure but work, not happiness but responsibility and achievement. He does not make philosophy an excuse for living prudently and apart, an artifice for withdrawing successfully from the game of life; he does not stand aside and merely look on; he puts his shoulder to the wheel; for him it is the essence of philosophy to feel the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and temptations, the joy of a hundred adventures; he risks himself constantly; he plays out to the end this bad game.[244]

To risk and to create, this is the meaning of life to the superman. He could not bear to be a man, if man could not be a poet, a maker. To change every “It was” into a “Thus I would have it!”--in this he finds that life may redeem itself. He is moved not by ambition but by a mighty overflowing spendthrift spirit that drives him on; he must remake; for this he compels all things to come to him and into him, in order that they may flow back from him as gifts of his love and his abundance; in this refashioning of things by thought he sees the holiness of life; the greatest events, he knows, are these still creative hours.[245]

He is a man of contrasts, or contradictions; he does not desire to be always the same man; he is a multitude of elements and of men; his value lies precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in the variety of burdens which he can bear, in the extent to which he can stretch his responsibility; in him the antagonistic character of existence is represented and justified. He loves instinct, knows that it is the fountain of all his energies; but he knows, too, the natural delight of æsthetic natures in measure, the pleasure of self-restraint, the exhilaration of the rider on a fiery steed. He is a selective principle, he rejects much; he reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that tardiness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him; he tests the approaching stimulus. He decides slowly; but he holds firmly to a decision made.[246]

He loves and has the qualities which the folk call virtues, but he loves too and shows the qualities which the folk call vices; it is again in this union of opposites that he rises above mediocrity; he is a broad arch that spans two banks lying far apart. The folk on either side fear him; for they cannot calculate on him, or classify him. He is a free spirit, an enemy of all fetters and labels; he belongs to no party, knowing that the man who belongs to a party perforce becomes a liar. He is a sceptic (not that he must appear to be one); freedom from any kind of conviction is a necessary factor in his strength of will. He does not make propaganda or proselytes; he keeps his ideals to himself as distinctions; his opinion is his opinion: another person has not easily a right to it; he has renounced the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody; like everything profound, he loves the mask; he does not descend to familiarity; and is not familiar when people think he is. If he cannot lead, he walks alone.[247]

He has not only intellect; if that were all it would not be enough; he has blood. Behind him is a lineage of culture and ability; lives of danger and distinction; his ancestors have paid the price for what he is, just as most men pay the price for what their ancestors have been. Naturally, then, he has a strong feeling of distance; he sees inequality and gradation, order and rank, everywhere among men. He has the most aristocratic of virtues: intellectual honesty. He does not readily become a friend or an enemy; he honors only his equals, and therefore cannot be the enemy of many; where one despises one cannot wage war. He lacks the power of easy reconciliation; but “retaliation” is as incomprehensible to him as “equal rights.” He remains just even as regards his injurer; despite the strong provocation of personal insult the clear and lofty objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled. He recognizes duties only to his equals; to others he does what he thinks best; he knows that justice is found only among equals. He has that distinctively aristocratic trait, the ability to command and with equal readiness to obey; that is indispensable to his pride. He will not permit himself to be praised; he does what serves his purpose. The essence of him is that he has a purpose, for which he will not hesitate to run all risks, even to sacrifice men, to bend their backs to the worst. That something may exist which is a hundred times more important than the question whether he feels well or unwell, and therefore too whether the others feel well or unwell: this is a fundamental instinct of his nature. To have a purpose, and to cleave to it through all dangers till it be achieved,--that is his great passion, that is himself.[248]

9

_How to Make Supermen_

It is our task, then, to procreate this synthetic man, who embodies everything and justifies it, and for whom the rest of mankind is but soil; to bring the philosopher, the artist, and the saint, within and without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of nature. In this cultivation lies the meaning of culture: the direction of all life to the end of producing the finest possible individuals. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; his very essence is to create a being higher than himself; that is the instinct of procreation, the instinct of action and of work. Even the higher man himself feels this need of begetting; and for lesser men all virtue and morals lie in preparing the way that the superman may come. There is no greater horror than the degenerating soul which says, “All for myself.” In this great purpose, too, is the essence of a better religion, and a surpassing of the bounds of narrow individualism; with this purpose there come moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light we understand the word “I” no longer; we feel that we are creating, and therefore in a sense becoming, something greater than ourselves.[249]