Chapter X: Soul-Image and Life-Feeling (2)

Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the _Diatribe_.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in _all_ Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far- ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion- element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the “religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old thoughtfulness an _intellectual male-prostitution_ by speech and writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical, so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved with this spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed.[450] Primitive Christianity was a _Magian_ religion and the soul of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know— introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that this propaganda affected _last_. What a difference, indeed what diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! _Here_ was youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape, and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware.

This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol- questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective, are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one _rises_ to them. Buddhism is unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol- question, and a whole series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of “everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his _Ecce Homo_.

VIII

Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization- ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to it wears its form.

Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the mightiest of Stoic creations.

_Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life- feeling under the aspect of Aims_;[452] for the directional movement of Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living, aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from Buddhism and Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of Nirvana and Ataraxia, are no less mechanical in design than Socialism is, but they know nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of expansion, of its will-to- infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.

In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is _not_ a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will- to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense, the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought to be given and must be given _freedom to do_, regardless of obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is _never_ the final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this respect Rousseau’s pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of Compassion and lays down the formula “_Act_, so that....” All ethic in this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula “Knowledge is Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the formula “Knowledge is Power.” The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with _his own_ spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole world bear the form of _his_ view, thus transferring the idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into the ethical field. This is the ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as though the maxims that you practise _were to become by your will the law for all_. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.

It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the concept of _work_ as commonly understood, _the civilised form of Faustian effecting_. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose moral programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or ardently championed—are only _effective_ in so far as they either lie, or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force. Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all modernism, between the popular side with its _dolce far niente_, its solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal peace—in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which _grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work_. If we would set against the Roman “panem et circenses” (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be _the_ “_Right to Work_.” This was the basis of Fichte’s thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the _Duty to Work_.

Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "_ære perennius_," the will- to-duration. Apollinian man looked _back_ to a Golden Age; this relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come. The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to _know_ the future, but the Westerner would _shape_ it. _The Third Kingdom is the Germanic ideal._ From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every great man has linked his life to an eternal _morning_. Alexander’s life was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for himself nor for France, but for the Future.

It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the different great Cultures has pictured _world-history_ in its own special way. Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically present with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal history was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of looking at history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of creation and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and Evil, God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its culmination, _one single Peripeteia_—the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man sees in history a tense unfolding towards an _aim_; its “ancient-mediæval-modern” sequence is a _dynamic_ image. He _cannot_ picture history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts is not indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it _is_ the image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.

And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air. It is the same with Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor and Galilean” and “Master- builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner and with everyone else. And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future—visions of millennial scope—nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it _had_ to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained conception of a “return,” which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life’s lie is the foundation of Bayreuth—which _would be_ something whereas Pergamum _was_ something—and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

IX

It remains, now, to say a word as to the _morphology of a history of philosophy_.

There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has its own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression and forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an intellectual ornamentation that is closely related to that of architecture and the arts of form. From the high and distant standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the answers are the _questions_—the choice of them, the inner form of them. For it is the _particular_ way in which a macrocosm presents itself to the understanding man of a _particular_ Culture that determines _a priori_ the whole necessity of asking them, and the way in which they are asked.

The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian and the Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further, in _each_ case, all the great questions have been posed at the very outset. There is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and bring into form, no Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come up for the old Orphic temple-teachings.

It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind expresses itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether such books are personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst ourselves or anonymous fluid masses of texts as in India, and whether the result is a set of comprehensible systems or, as in Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are veiled in expressions of art and ritual. Whatever the variations, the general course of philosophies as organisms is the same. At the beginning of every springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living, and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic distinctions, not only of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime, thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, _priests_. Such were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455] centuries. With the setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know more than the fact that they existed.

At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after them there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture, thought mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and answering them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression—and, as we have said before, ornamental significance—until exhausted; and then it passes into a decline in which the problems of knowing are in every respect stale repetitions of no significance. There is a metaphysical period, originally of a religious and finally of a rationalistic cast—in which thought and life still contain something of chaos, an unexploited fund that enables them effectively to create—and an ethical period in which life itself, now become megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry and has to turn the still available remainder of philosophical creative- power on to its own conduct and maintenance. In the one period life _reveals_ itself, the other has life as its _object_. The one is “theoretical” (contemplative) in the grand sense, the other perforce practical. Even the Kantian system is in its deepest characters _contemplated_ in the first instance and _only afterwards_ logically and systematically formulated and ordered.

We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism. And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the analytical mathematic, and the same is true, _mutatis mutandis_, of the great pre- Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician, negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte, Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better. When the form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength but also what may be called the _grand style_ of thinking. Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker (_Gelegenheitsdenker_).

With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it _is_ philosophy, the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the sake of the fourth book that the first three exist at all. Kant merely _thought_ that it was the same with him; in reality, pure and not applied reason is still his centre of creation. There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle—on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a _formal_ ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory _ad hoc_ metaphysic for basis. And the entire absence of logical scruple with which Nietzsche, for instance, dashes off such theories makes no difference whatever to our appreciation of his philosophy proper.

It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to develop his system by the pessimism that fell upon him in his seventeenth year. Shaw, a most significant witness, observes in his “Quintessence of Ibsenism” that one may quite well accept Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his metaphysics—therein quite accurately discriminating between that which makes him the first thinker of the new age and that which is included because an obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the attempt would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one has no difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-through an inner and very early experience, while he covered his metaphysical requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of a few books, and never managed to state even his ethical theory with any exactitude. Just the same overlay of living seasonable ethical thought on a stratum of metaphysics required by convention (but in fact superfluous) is to be found in Epicurus and the Stoics. We need have no doubt after this as to what is the essence of a Civilization-philosophy.

Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a _social-ethical_ and _social-economic_ character. The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a _critique of society_.

The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the _imperative_ mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical ethics, _it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world_—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.

To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. _Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis_ applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought- structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing- become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional- logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration. _The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity._ Each epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and conceptual subtleties.

Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is _only_ Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from actual practitioners) are the _dramatists_. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or what it might be.

Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche—namely, productive criticism of the Western morale—while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.

Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphänomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one passage. In “The World as Will and Idea” Schopenhauer says: “The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter’s activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the outer world.” Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,[459] as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin’s main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is _anticipated Darwinism_, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der Natur” (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.[460]

It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[461] Proof, to the Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore is a _method and not a result_—was known in all details to the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester School” system, and it is this _latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity_.

The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our _will_ and sense of _aim_ which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the _a priori_ form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for existence, which he read _into_ Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities. And it is this system and not this primary feeling that is the basis of the utterances of “Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems of the “Ring of the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that Schopenhauer, the first of his line, perceived what his own knowledge meant—that is the root of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his adherent Wagner is its highest expression—whereas the late men, and foremost among them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is true, the enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.

Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German spirit over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of school- allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to Darwin, from the metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the same world-feeling, from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect that in fact is common to _both_, the one seeing as will-to-life what the other regards as struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” he still means by evolution an inner ripening, but the Superman is the product of evolution as machinery. And “Zarathustra” is _ethically_ the outcome of an unconscious protest against “Parsifal”—which _artistically_ entirely governs it—of the rivalry of one evangelist for another.

But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon. Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and on the surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman, the specific maxims of _his own_ Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche’s reasoning is its _practical_ bases and consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,” “Sinn der Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object in talking about it if nothing is going to be _done_ about it—asks how it is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious, to draw. If we _do_ talk of systematic breeding—a completely materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic _compulsion_ as the _means_; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it involves a _common_ action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of “Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.

The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of “selection.” Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization.

In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory. The Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a Renaissance phenomenon is something closely (one would have supposed, obviously) akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact that of which Marx (that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in his _Das Kapital_, the bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[462] That is the genealogy of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to the realistic, political and economic domain, finds its expression in Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality, stands at the culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but here Shaw the party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power is to-day represented by the two poles of public life—the worker-class and the big money-and-brain men—far more effectually than it ever was by a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of Shaw’s best comedy is a Superman, though Nietzsche the Romanticist would not have recognized his ideal in such a figure. Nietzsche is for ever speaking of transvaluations of all values, of a philosophy of the “Future” (which, incidentally, is merely the Western, and not the Chinese or the African future), but when the mists of his thought do come in from the Dionysiac distance and condense into any tangible form, the will-to-power appears to him in the guise of dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and “deal.” And yet he says that the idea first came to him when he saw the Prussian regiments marching to battle in 1870.

The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the “Ring,” his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the “Origin of Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical expression at the very same time in the third act of “Siegfried” and in “Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels’s writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama _Zu irgend einer Zeit_, coincided precisely with those of the future “Communist Manifesto.” And, upon first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 19, 1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_ and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his _Herodes und Mariamne_. Hebbel’s diaries, of which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were (though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.

The _actual and effective_ philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has as its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-Power in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it as will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea, and as dramatic figure. (The period that is _closed_ by Shaw corresponds to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-Century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “professors’ philosophy by philosophy-professors.” The real landmarks are these:

1819. Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_. The will to
life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force,
Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put
there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).

1836. Schopenhauer, _Ueber den Willen in der Natur_. Anticipation of
Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.

1840. Proud’hon, _Qu’est-ce que la Propriété_, basis of Anarchism.
Comte, _Cours de philosophic positive_; the formula “order and
progress.”

1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New Woman”
and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, _Das Wesen des Christenthums_.

1844. Engels, _Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie_, foundation
of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, _Maria Magdalena_,
the first social drama.

1847. Marx, _Misère de la Philosophie_ (synthesis of Hegel and
Malthus). These are the _epochal years_ in which economics begins to
dominate social ethic and biology.

1848. Wagner’s “Death of Siegfried”; Siegfried as social-ethical
revolutionary, the Fafnir hoard as symbol of Capitalism.

1850. Wagner’s _Kunst und Klima_; the sexual problem.

1850-1858. Wagner’s, Hebbel’s and Ibsen’s Nibelung poetry.

1859 (year of symbolic coincidences). Darwin, “Origin of Species”
(application of economics to biology). Wagner’s “Tristan.” Marx, _Zur
Kritik der politischen Ökonomie_.

1863. J. S. Mill, “Utilitarianism.”

1865. Dühring, _Wert des Lebens_—a work which is rarely heard of, but
which exercised the greatest influence upon the succeeding generation.

1867. Ibsen, “Brand.” Marx, _Das Kapital_.

1878. Wagner “Parsifal.” First dissolution of materialism into
mysticism.

1879. Ibsen “Nora.”

1881. Nietzsche, _Morgenröthe_; transition from Schopenhauer to
Darwin, morale as biological phenomenon.

1883. Nietzsche, _Also sprach Zarathustra_; the Will-to-Power, but in
Romantic disguise.

1886. Ibsen, “Rosmersholm.” Nietzsche, _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_.

1887-8. Strindberg, “Fadren” and “Fröken Julie.”

From 1890 the conclusion of the epoch approaches. The religious works
of Strindberg and the symbolical of Ibsen.

1896. Ibsen, “John Gabriel Borkman.” Nietzsche, _Uebermensch_. 1898.
Strindberg, “Till Damascus.”

From 1900 the last phenomena.

1903. Weininger, _Geschlecht und Charakter_; the only serious attempt
to revive Kant within this epoch, by referring him to Wagner and
Ibsen.

1903. Shaw, “Man and Superman”; final synthesis of Darwin and
Nietzsche.

1905. Shaw, “Major Barbara”; the type of the Superman referred back to
its economic origins.

With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had done. Ethical Socialism, prepared by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt, was at its zenith of passionate greatness about the middle of the 19th Century, and at the end thereof it had reached the stage of repetitions. The 20th Century, while keeping the _word_ Socialism, has replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain “socialistic” but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with _both_ simply as the historical expression of a Culture.

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CHAPTER XI
FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN
NATURE-KNOWLEDGE