Prophets of Dissent Part 5

We have sought to dispel the fiction about the shaping influence of Nietzsche upon the thought and conduct of his nation, and have accounted for the miscarriage of his ethics by their fantastic impracticability.

Yet it has been shown also that he fostered in an unmistakable fashion the cla.s.s-consciousness of the aristocrat, born or self-appointed. To that extent his influence was certainly malign. Yet doubtless he did perform a service to our age. The specific nature of this service, stated in the fewest words, is that to his great divinatory gift are we indebted for an unprecedented strengthening of our hold upon reality. In order to make this point clear we have to revert once more to Nietzsche's transient intellectual relation to pessimism.

We have seen that the illusionism of Schopenhauer and more particularly of Wagner exerted a strong attraction on his high-strung artistic temperament.

Nevertheless a certain realistic counter-drift to the ultra-romantic tendency of Wagner's theory caused him in the long run to reject the faith in the power of Art to save man from evil. Almost abruptly, his personal affection for the "Master," to whom in his eventual mental eclipse he still referred tenderly at lucid moments, changed to bitter hostility. Henceforth he cla.s.ses the glorification of Art as one of the three most despicable att.i.tudes of life: Philistinism, Pietism, and Estheticism, all of which have their origin in _cowardice_, represent three branches of the ignominious road of escape from the terrors of living. In three extended diatribes Nietzsche denounces Wagner as the archetype of modern decadence; the most violent attack of all is delivered against the point of juncture in which Wagner's art gospel and the Christian religion culminate: the promise of redemption through pity. To Nietzsche's way of thinking pity is merely the coward's acknowledgment of his weakness. For only insomuch as a man is devoid of fort.i.tude in bearing his own sufferings is he unable to contemplate with equanimity the sufferings of his fellow creatures. Since religion enjoins compa.s.sion with all forms of human misery, we should make war upon religion. And for the reason that Wagner's crowning achievement, his _Parsifal_, is a veritable sublimation of Mercy, there can be no truce between its creator and the giver of the counsel: "Be hard!"

Perhaps this notorious advice is after all not as ominous as it sounds.

It merely expresses rather abruptly Nietzsche's confidence in the value of self-control as a means of discipline. If you have learned calmly to see others suffer, you are yourself able to endure distress with manful composure. "Therefore I wash the hand which helped the sufferer; therefore I even wipe my soul." But, unfortunately, such is the frailty of human nature that it is only one step from indifference about the sufferings of others to an inclination to exploit them or even to inflict pain upon one's neighbors for the sake of personal gain of one sort or another.

Why so hard? said once the charcoal unto the diamond, are we not near relations?

Why so soft? O my brethren, thus I ask you. Are ye not my brethren?

Why so soft, so unresisting, and yielding? Why is there so much disavowal and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?

And if ye are not willing to be fates, and inexorable, how could ye conquer with me someday?

And if your hardness would not glance, and cut, and chip into pieces--how could ye create with me some day?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness unto you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax,--

Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon bra.s.s,--harder than bra.s.s, n.o.bler than bra.s.s. The n.o.blest only is perfectly hard.

This new table, O my brethren, I put over you: Become hard!(22)

(22) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 399, sec. 29.

The repudiation of Wagner leaves a tremendous void in Nietzsche's soul by depriving his enthusiasm of its foremost concrete object. He loses his faith in idealism. When illusions can bring a man like Wagner to such an odious outlook upon life, they must be obnoxious in themselves; and so, after being subjected to pitiless a.n.a.lysis, they are disowned and turned into ridicule. And now, the pendulum of his zeal having swung from one emotional extreme to the other, the great rhapsodist finds himself temporarily dest.i.tute of an adequate theme. However, his fervor does not long remain in abeyance, and soon it is absorbed in a new object. Great as is the move it is logical enough. Since illusions are only a hindrance to the fuller grasp of life which behooves all free spirits, Nietzsche energetically turns from self-deception to its opposite, self-realization. In this new spiritual endeavor he relies far more on intuition than on scientific and metaphysical speculation. From his own stand he is certainly justified in doing this. Experimentation and ratiocination at the best are apt to disa.s.sociate individual realities from their complex setting and then proceed to palm them off as ill.u.s.trations of life, when in truth they are lifeless, artificially preserved specimens.

"Encheiresin naturae nennt's die Chemie, Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie."(23)

Nietzsche's realism, by contrast, goes to the very quick of nature, grasps all the gifts of life, and from the continuous flood of phenomena extracts a rich, full-flavored essence. It is from a sense of grat.i.tude for this boon that he becomes an idolatrous worshiper of experience, "_der grosse Jasager_,"--the great sayer of Yes,--and the most stimulating optimist of all ages. To Nietzsche reality is alive as perhaps never to man before. He plunges down to the very heart of things, absorbs their vital qualities and meanings, and having himself learned to draw supreme satisfaction from the most ordinary facts and events, he makes the common marvelous to others, which, as was said by James Russell Lowell, is a true test of genius. No wonder that deification of reality becomes the dominant _motif_ in his philosophy.

But again that onesided aristocratic strain perverts his ethics. To drain the intoxicating cup at the feast of life, such is the divine privilege not of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. They must not let this or that petty and artificial convention, nor yet this or that moral command or prohibition, restrain them from the exercise of that higher sense of living, but must fully abandon themselves to its joys. "Since man came into existence he hath had too little joy. That alone, my brethren, is our original sin."(24) The "much-too-many" are doomed to inanity by their lack of appet.i.te at the banquet of life:

Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite: "All is vanity!"

But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain art! Break, break the tables of those who are never joyful!(25)

(23) Goethe's _Faust_, II, ll. 1940-1. Bayard Taylor translates: _Encheiresin naturae_, this Chemistry names, nor knows how herself she banters and blames!

(24) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 120.

(25) _Ibid._, p. 296, sec. 13.

The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the remote felicities of any problematic future state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be understood by any means as a ba.n.a.l devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting or crushing, the factors of supreme spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in experience, the Will to Live encompa.s.ses jointly the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said that since man owes some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The unmistakable sign of heroism is _amor fati_, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it may.

Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a capacious apt.i.tude for suffering. "Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims Nietzsche, "and we,--it seems that we would rather have it even greater and worse than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering,--tragical suffering,--know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought about every elevation of man?" "Spirit is that life which cutteth into life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge increaseth;--knew ye that before? And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears as a sacrificial animal;--knew ye that before?" And if, then, the tragical pain inherent in life be no argument against Joyfulness, the zest of living can be obscured by nothing save the fear of total extinction. To the disciple of Nietzsche, by whom every moment of his existence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of his irrevocable separation from all things is unbearable. "'Was this life?'

I shall say to Death. 'Well, then, once more!'" And--to paraphrase Nietzsche's own simile--the insatiable witness of the great tragi-comedy, spectator and partic.i.p.ant at once, being loath to leave the theatre, and eager for a repet.i.tion of the performance, shouts his endless _encore_, praying fervently that in the constant repet.i.tion of the performance not a single detail of the action be omitted. The yearning for the endlessness not of life at large, not of life on any terms, but of _this my life_ with its ineffable wealth of rapturous moments, works up the extreme optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous _a priori_ notion of infinity, expressed in the name _die ewige Wiederkehr_ ("Eternal Recurrence"). It is a staggeringly imaginative concept, formed apart from any evidential grounds, and yet fortified with a fair amount of logical armament. The universe is imagined as endless in time, although its material contents are not equally conceived as limitless.

Since, consequently, there must be a limit to the possible variety in the arrangement and sequence of the sum total of data, even as in the case of a kaleidoscope, the possibility of variegations is not infinite.

The particular co-ordination of things in the universe, say at this particular moment, is bound to recur again and again in the pa.s.sing of the eons. But under the nexus of cause and effect the resurgence of the past from the ocean of time is not accidental nor is the configuration of things haphazard, as is true in the case of the kaleidoscope; rather, history, in the most inclusive acceptation of the term, is predestined to repeat itself; this happens through the perpetual progressive resurrection of its particles. It is then to be a.s.sumed that any aspect which the world has ever presented must have existed innumerable millions of times before, and must recur with eternal periodicity. That the deterministic strain in this tremendous _Vorstellung_ of a cyclic rhythm throbbing in the universe entangles its author's fanatical belief in evolution in a rather serious self-contradiction, does not detract from its spiritual lure, nor from its wide suggestiveness, however incapable it may be of scientific demonstration.

From unfathomed depths of feeling wells up the paean of the prophet of the life intense.

O Mensch! Gib Acht!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?

Ich schlief, ich schlief--, Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:-- Die Welt ist tief, Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Tief ist ihr Weh--, l.u.s.t--tiefer noch als Herzeleid: Weh spricht: Vergeh!

Doch alle l.u.s.t will Ewigkeit-- Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!(26)

(26)

O man! Lose not sight!

What saith the deep midnight?

"I lay in sleep, in sleep; From deep dream I woke to light.

The world is deep, And deeper than ever day though! it might.

Deep is its woe,-- And deeper still than woe--delight."

Saith woe: "Pa.s.s, go!

Eternity's sought by all delight,-- Eternity deep--by all delight.

"Thus Spake Zarathustra," The Drunken Song, p. 174.--The translation but faintly suggests the poetic appeal of the original.

A timid heart may indeed recoil from the iron necessity of reliving _ad infinitum_ its woeful terrestrial fate. But the prospect can hold no terror for the heroic soul by whose fiat all items of experience have a.s.sumed important meanings and values. He who has cast in his lot with Destiny in spontaneous submission to all its designs, cannot but revere and cherish his own fate as an integral part of the grand unalterable fatality of things.

If this crude presentment of Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine has not entirely failed of its purpose, the _leitmotifs_ of that doctrine will have been readily referred by the reader to their origin; they can be subsumed under that temperamental category which is more or less accurately defined as the _romantic_. Glorification of violent pa.s.sion,--quest of innermost mysteries,--boundless expansion of self-consciousness,--visions of a future of transcendent magnificence, and notwithstanding an ardent worship of reality a quixotically impracticable detachment from the concrete basis of civic life,--these outstanding characteristics of the Nietzschean philosophy give unmistakable proof of a central, driving, romantic inspiration: Nietzsche shifts the essence and principle of being to a new center of gravity, by subst.i.tuting the Future for the Present and relying on the untrammeled expansion of spontaneous forces which upon closer examination are found to be without definite aim or practical goal.

For this reason, critically to animadvert upon Nietzsche as a social reformer would be utterly out of place; he is simply too much of a poet to be taken seriously as a statesman or politician. The weakness of his philosophy before the forum of Logic has been referred to before.

Nothing can be easier than to prove the incompatibility of some of his theorems. How, for instance, can the absolute determinism of the belief in Cyclic Recurrence be reconciled with the power vested in superman to deflect by his autonomous will the straight course of history? Or, to touch upon a more practical social aspect of his teaching,--if in the order of nature all men are unequal, how can we ever bring about the right selection of leaders, how indeed can we expect to secure the due ascendancy of character and intellect over the gregarious grossness of the demos?

Again, it is easy enough to controvert Nietzsche almost at any pa.s.s by demonstrating his unphilosophic onesidedness. Were Nietzsche not stubbornly onesided, he would surely have conceded--as any sane-minded person must concede in these times of suffering and sacrifice--that charity, self-abnegation, and self-immolation might be viewed, not as conclusive proofs of degeneracy, but on the contrary as signs of growth towards perfection. Besides, philosophers of the _metier_ are sure to object to the haziness of Nietzsche's idea of Vitality which in truth is oriented, as is his philosophy in general, less by thought than by sentiment.

Notwithstanding his obvious connection with significant contemporaneous currents, the author of "Zarathustra" is altogether too much _sui generis_ to be amenable to any crude and rigid cla.s.sification. He may plausibly be labelled an anarchist, yet no definition of anarchism will wholly take him in. Anarchism stands for the demolition of the extant social apparatus of restraint. Its battle is for the free determination of personal happiness. Nietzsche's prime concern, contrarily, is with internal self-liberation from the obsessive desire for personal happiness in any accepted connotation of the term; such happiness to him does not const.i.tute the chief object of life.

The cardinal point of Nietzsche's doctrine is missed by those who, arguing retrospectively, expound the gist of his philosophy as an incitation to barbarism. Nothing can be more remote from his intentions than the transformation of society into a horde of ferocious brutes. His impeachment of mercy, notwithstanding an appearance of reckless impiety, is in the last a.n.a.lysis no more and no less than an expedient in the truly romantic pursuit of a new ideal of Love. Compa.s.sion, in his opinion, hampers the progress towards forms of living that shall be pregnant with a new and superior type of perfection. And in justice to Nietzsche it should be borne in mind that among the various manifestations of that human failing there is none he scorns so deeply as cowardly and petty commiseration of self. It also deserves to be emphasized that he nowhere endorses selfishness when exercised for small or sordid objects. "I love the brave. But it is not enough to be a swordsman, one must also know against whom to use the sword. And often there is more bravery in one's keeping quiet and going past, in order to spare one's self for a worthier enemy: Ye shall have only enemies who are to be hated, but not enemies who are to be despised."(27) Despotism must justify itself by great and worthy ends. And no man must be permitted to be hard towards others who lacks the strength of being even harder towards himself.

(27) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 304.

At all events it must serve a better purpose to appraise the practical importance of Nietzsche's speculations than blankly to denounce their immoralism. Nietzsche, it has to be repeated, was not on the whole a creator of new ideas. His extraordinary influence in the recent past is not due to any supreme originality or fertility of mind; it is predominantly due to his eagle-winged imagination. In him the emotional urge of utterance was, accordingly, incomparably more potent than the purely intellectual force of opinion: in fact the texture of his philosophy is woven of sensations rather than of ideas, hence its decidedly ethical trend.

The latent value of Nietzsche's ethics in their application to specific social problems it would be extremely difficult to determine. Their successful application to general world problems, if it were possible, would mean the ruin of the only form of civilization that signifies to us. His philosophy, if swallowed in the whole, poisons; in large potations, intoxicates; but in reasonable doses, strengthens and stimulates. Such danger as it harbors has no relation to grossness. His call to the Joy of Living and Doing is no encouragement of vulgar hedonism, but a challenge to persevering effort. He urges the supreme importance of vigor of body and mind and force of will. "O my brethren, I consecrate you to be, and show unto you the way unto a new n.o.bility.

Ye shall become procreators and breeders and sowers of the future.--Not whence ye come be your honor in future, but whither ye go! Your will, and your foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves, be that your new honor!"(28)

(28) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 294.

It would be a withering mistake to advocate the translation of Nietzsche's poetic dreams into the prose of reality. Unquestionably his Utopia if it were to be carried into practice would doom to utter extinction the world it is devised to regenerate. But it is generally acknowledged that "prophets have a right to be unreasonable," and so, if we would square ourselves with Friedrich Nietzsche in a spirit of fairness, we ought not to forget that the daring champion of reckless unrestraint is likewise the inspired apostle of action, power, enthusiasm, and aspiration, in fine, a prophet of Vitality and a messenger of Hope.