Part 3

Nietzsche; Thoughts out of Season, II., p. 155 f. (English edition). Renan: Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques, p. 103. Flaubert: Lettres à George Sand, p. 139 ff.

Four of Nietzsche's early works bear the collective title, Thoughts out of Season (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), a title which is significant of his early-formed determination to go against the stream.

One of the fields in which he opposed the spirit of the age in Germany is that of education, since he condemns in the most uncompromising fashion the entire historical system of education of which Germany is proud, and which as a rule is everywhere regarded as desirable.

His view is that what keeps the race from breathing freely and willing boldly is that it drags far too much of its past about with it, like a round-shot chained to a convict's leg. He thinks it is historical education that fetters the race both in enjoyment and in action, since he who cannot concentrate himself on the moment and live entirely in it, can neither feel happiness himself nor do anything to make others happy. Without the power of feeling unhistorically, there is no happiness. And in the same way, forgetfulness, or rather, non-knowledge of the past is essential to all action. Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is as it were the enveloping air, the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist--and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished. Now answering to this, says Nietzsche, there exists a certain degree of historical knowledge which is destructive of a man's energy and fatal to the productive powers of a nation.

In this reasoning we can hear the voice of the learned German philologist, whose observations have mostly been drawn from German scholars and artists. For it would be unreasonable to suppose that the commercial or peasant class, the soldiers or manufacturers of Germany suffered from an excess of historical culture. But even in the case of German savants, authors and artists the evil here pointed out may be of such a nature as not to admit of remedy by simply abolishing historical education. Those men whose productive impulse has been checked or killed by historical studies were already so impotent and ineffective that the world would not have been enriched by their productions. And moreover, what paralyses is not so much the heterogeneous mass of dead historical learning (about the actions of governments, political chess-moves, military achievements, artistic styles, etc.), as the knowledge of certain great minds of the past, by the side of whose production anything that can be shown by a man now living appears so insignificant as to make it a matter of indifference whether his work sees the light or not. Goethe alone is enough to reduce a young German poet to despair. But a hero-worshipper like Nietzsche cannot consistently desire to curtail our knowledge of the greatest.

The want of artistic courage and intellectual boldness has certainly deeper-lying causes; above all, the disintegration of the individuality which the modern order of society involves. Strong men can carry a heavy load of history without becoming incapacitated for living.

But what is interesting and significant of Nietzsche's whole intellectual standpoint is his inquiry as to how far life is able to make use of history. History, in his view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through milleniums, could not stand clearly and vividly before me. When one sees, that it only took about a hundred men to bring in the culture of the Renaissance; it may easily be supposed, for example, that a hundred productive minds, trained in a new style, would be enough to make an end of Culture-Philistinism. On the other hand, history may have pernicious effects in the hands of unproductive men. Thus young artists are driven into galleries instead of out into nature, and are sent, with minds still unformed, to centres of art, where they lose courage. And in all its forms history may render men unfit for life; in its monumental form by evoking the illusion that there are such things as fixed, recurring historical conjunctions, so that what has once been possible is now, in entirely altered conditions, possible again; in its antiquarian form by awakening a feeling of piety for ancient, bygone things, which paralyses the man of action, who must always outrage some piety or other; finally in its critical form by giving rise to the depressing feeling that the very errors of the past, which we are striving to overcome, are inherited in our blood and impressed on our childhood, so that we live in a continual inner conflict between an old and a new nature.

On this point, as on others already alluded to, Nietzsche's quarrel is ultimately with the broken-winded education of the present day. That education and historical education have in our time almost become synonymous terms, is to him a mournful sign. It has been irretrievably forgotten that culture ought to be what it was with the Greeks: a motive, a prompting to resolution; nowadays culture is commonly described as inwardness, because it is a dead internal lump, which does not stir its possessor. The most "educated" people are walking encyclopædias. When they act, they do so in virtue of a universally approved, miserable convention, or else from simple barbarism.

With this reflection, no doubt of general application, is connected a complaint which was bound to be evoked by modern literary Germany in particular; the complaint of the oppressive effect of the greatness of former times, as shown in the latter-day man's conviction that he is a latecomer, an after-birth of a greater age, who may indeed teach himself history, but can never produce it.

Even philosophy, Nietzsche complains, with a side-glance at the German universities, has been more and more transformed into the history of philosophy, a teaching of what everybody has thought about everything; "a sort of harmless gossip between academic grey-beards and academic sucklings." It is boasted as a point of honour that freedom of thought exists in various countries. In reality it is only a poor sort of freedom. One may think in a hundred ways, but one may only act in one way--and that is the way that is called "culture" and is in reality "only a form, and what is more a bad form, a uniform."

Nietzsche attacks the view which regards the historically cultured person as the justest of all. We honour the historian who aims at pure knowledge, from which nothing follows. But there are many trivial truths, and it is a misfortune that whole battalions of inquirers should fling themselves upon them, even if these narrow minds belong to honest men. The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

As historical education is now conducted, the mass of impressions communicated is so great as to produce numbness, a feeling of being born old of an old stock--although less than thirty human lives, reckoned at seventy years each, divide us from the beginning of our era. And with this is connected the immense superstition of the value and significance of universal history. Schiller's phrase is everlastingly repeated: "The history of the world is the tribunal of the world," as though there could be any other historical tribunal than thought; and the Hegelian view of history as the ever-clearer self-revelation of the godhead has obstinately held its own, only that it has gradually passed into sheer admiration of success, an approval of any and every fact, be it never so brutal. But greatness has nothing to do with results or with success. Demosthenes, who spoke in vain, is greater than Philip, who was always victorious. Everything in our day is thought to be in order, if only it be an accomplished fact; even when a man of genius dies in the fulness of his powers, proofs are forthcoming that he died at the right time. And the fragment of history we possess is entitled "the world process"; men cudgel their brains, like Eduard von Hartmann, in trying to find out its origin and final goal--which seems to be a waste of time. Why you exist, says Nietzsche with Sören Kierkegaard, nobody in the world can tell you in advance; but since you do exist, try to give your existence a meaning by setting up for yourself as lofty and noble a goal as you can.

Significant of Nietzsche's aristocratic tendency, so marked later, is his anger with the deference paid by modern historians to the masses. Formerly, he argues, history was written from the standpoint of the rulers; it was occupied exclusively with them, however mediocre or bad they might be. Now it has crossed over to the standpoint of the masses. But the masses--they are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools. Otherwise they are matter for statisticians to deal with, who find so-called historical laws in the instincts of the masses--aping, laziness, hunger and sexual impulse. What has set the mass in motion for any length of time is then called great. It is given the name of a historical power. When, for example, the vulgar mob has appropriated or adapted to its needs some religious idea, has defended it stubbornly and dragged it along for centuries, then the originator of that idea is called great. There is the testimony of thousands of years for it, we are told. But--this is Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's idea--the noblest and highest does not affect the masses at all, either at the moment or later. Therefore the historical success of a religion, its toughness and persistence, witness against its founder's greatness rather than for it.

When an instance is required of one of the few enterprises in history that have been completely successful, the Reformation is commonly chosen. Against the significance of this success Nietzsche does not urge the facts usually quoted: its early secularisation by Luther; his compromises with those in power; the interest of princes in emancipating themselves from the mastery of the Church and laying hands on its estates, while at the same time securing a submissive and dependent clergy instead of one independent of the State. He sees the chief cause of the success of the Reformation in the uncultured state of the nations of northern Europe. Many attempts at founding new Greek religions came to naught in antiquity. Although men like Pythagoras, Plato, perhaps Empedocles, had qualifications as founders of religions, the individuals they had to deal with were far too diversified in their nature to be helped by a common doctrine of faith and hope. In contrast with this, the success of Luther's Reformation in the North was an indication that northern culture was behind that of southern Europe. The people either blindly obeyed a watchword from above, like a flock of sheep; or, where conversion was a matter of conscience, it revealed how little individuality there was among a population which was found to be so homogeneous in its spiritual needs. In the same way, too, the original conversion of pagan antiquity was only successful on account of the abundant intermixture of barbarian with Roman blood which had taken place. The new doctrine was forced upon the masters of the world by barbarians and slaves.

The reader now has examples of the arguments Nietzsche employs in support of his proposition that history is not so sound and strengthening an educational factor as is thought: only he who has learnt to know life and is equipped for action has use for history and is capable of applying it; others are oppressed by it and rendered unproductive by being made to feel themselves late-comers, or are induced to worship success in every field.

Nietzsche's contribution to this question is a plea against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts--of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks. He has developed this view in the learned and profound work of his youth, The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism, in which he introduced two new terms, Apollonian and Dionysian. The two Greek deities of art, Apollo and Dionysus, denote the antithesis between plastic art and music. The former corresponds to dreaming, the latter to drunkenness. In dreams the forms of the gods first appeared to men; dreams are the world of beauteous appearance. If, on the other hand, we look down into man's lowest depths, below the spheres of thought and imagination, we come upon a world of terror and rapture, the realm of Dionysus. Above reign beauty, measure and proportion; but underneath the profusion of Nature surges freely in pleasure and pain. Regarded from Nietzsche's later standpoint, the deeper motive of this searching absorption in Hellenic antiquity becomes apparent. Even at this early stage he suspects, in what passes for morality, a disparaging principle directed against Nature; he looks for its essential antithesis, and finds it in the purely artistic principle, farthest removed from Christianity, which he calls Dionysian.

Our author's main psychological features are now clearly apparent. What kind of a nature is it that carries this savage hatred of philistinism even as far as to David Strauss? An artist's nature, obviously. What kind of a writer is it who warns us with such firm conviction against the dangers of historical culture? A philologist obviously, who has experienced them in himself, has felt himself threatened with becoming a mere aftermath and tempted to worship historical success. What kind of a nature is it that so passionately defines culture as the worship of genius? Certainly no Eckermann-nature, but an enthusiast, willing at the outset to obey where he cannot command, but quick to recognise his own masterful bias, and to see that humanity is far from having outgrown the ancient antithetical relation of commanding and obeying. The appearance of Napoleon is to him, as to many others, a proof of this; in the joy that thrilled thousands, when at last they saw one who knew how to command.

But in the sphere of ethics he is not disposed to preach obedience. On the contrary, constituted as he is, he sees the apathy and meanness of our modern morality in the fact that it still upholds obedience as the highest moral commandment, instead of the power of dictating to one's self one's own morality.

His military schooling and participation in the war of 1870-71 probably led to his discovery of a hard and manly quality in himself, and imbued him with an extreme abhorrence of all softness and effeminacy. He turned aside with disgust from the morality of pity in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from the romantic-catholic element in Wagner's music, to both of which he had previously paid homage. He saw that he had transformed both masters according to his own needs, and he understood quite well the instinct of self preservation that was here at work. The aspiring mind creates the helpers it requires. Thus he afterwards dedicated his book, Human, all-too-Human, which was published on Voltaire's centenary, to the "free spirits" among his contemporaries; his dreams created the associates that he had not yet found in the flesh.

The severe and painful illness, which began in his thirty-second year and long made him a recluse, detached him from all romanticism and freed his heart from all bonds of piety. It carried him far away from pessimism, in virtue of his proud thought that "a sufferer has no right to pessimism." This illness made a philosopher of him in a strict sense. His thoughts stole inquisitively along forbidden paths: This thing passes for a value. Can we not turn it upside-down? This is regarded as good. Is it not rather evil?--Is not God refuted? But can we say as much of the devil?--Are we not deceived? and deceived deceivers, all of us?...

And then out of this long sickliness arises a passionate desire for health, the joy of the convalescent in life, in light, in warmth, in freedom and ease of mind, in the range and horizon of thought, in "visions of new dawns," in creative capacity, in poetical strength. And he enters upon the lofty self-confidence and ecstasy of a long uninterrupted production.

It is neither possible nor necessary to review here the long series of his writings. In calling attention to an author who is still unread, one need only throw his most characteristic thoughts and expressions into relief, so that the reader with little trouble may form an idea of his way of thinking and quality of mind. The task is here rendered difficult by Nietzsche's thinking in aphorisms, and facilitated by his habit of emphasising every thought in such a way as to give it a startling appearance.

English utilitarianism has met with little acceptance in Germany; among more eminent contemporary thinkers Eugen Dühring is its chief advocate; Friedrich Paulsen also sides with the Englishmen. Eduard von Hartmann has attempted to demonstrate the impossibility of simultaneously promoting culture and happiness. Nietzsche finds new difficulties in an analysis of the concept of happiness. The object of utilitarianism is to procure humanity as much pleasure and as little of the reverse as possible. But what if pleasure and pain are so intertwined that he who wants all the pleasure he can get must take a corresponding amount of suffering into the bargain? Clärchen's song contains the words: "Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt" Who knows whether the latter is not the condition of the former? The Stoics believed this, and, wishing to avoid pain, asked of life the minimum of pleasure. Probably it is equally unwise in our day to promise men intense joys, if they are to be insured against great sufferings.

We see that Nietzsche transfers the question to the highest spiritual plane, without regard to the fact that the lowest and commonest misfortunes, such as hunger, physical exhaustion, excessive and unhealthy labour, yield no compensation in violent joys. Even if all pleasure be dearly bought, it does not follow that all pain is interrupted and counterbalanced by intense enjoyment.

In accordance with his aristocratic bias he then attacks Bentham's proposition: the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. The ideal was, of course, to procure happiness for everybody; as this could not be done, the formula took the above shape. But why happiness for the greatest number? We might imagine it for the best, the noblest, the most gifted; and we may be permitted to ask whether moderate prosperity and moderate well-being are preferable to the inequality of lot which acts as a goad, forcing culture ever upward.

Then there is the doctrine of unselfishness. To be moral is to be unselfish. It is good to be so, we are told. But what does that mean--good? Good for whom? Not for the self-sacrificer, but for his neighbour. He who praises the virtue of unselfishness, praises something that is good for the community but harmful to the individual. And the neighbour who wants to be loved unselfishly is not himself unselfish. The fundamental contradiction in this morality is that it demands and commends a renunciation of the ego, for the benefit of another ego.

At the outset the essential and invaluable element of all morality is, in Nietzsche's view, simply this, that it is a prolonged constraint. As language gains in strength and freedom by the constraint of verse, and as all the freedom and delicacy to be found in plastic art, music and dancing is the result of arbitrary laws, so also does human nature only attain its development under constraint. No violence is thereby done to Nature; this is the very nature of things.

The essential point is that there should be obedience, for a long time and in the same direction. Thou shalt obey, some one or something, and for a long time--otherwise thou wilt come to grief; this seems to be the moral imperative of Nature, which is certainly neither categorical (as Kant thought), nor addressed to the individual (Nature does not trouble about the individual), but seems to be addressed to nations, classes, periods, races--in fact, to mankind. On the other hand, all the morality that is addressed to the individual for his own good, for the sake of his own welfare, is reduced in this view to mere household remedies and counsels of prudence, recipes for curbing passions that might want to break out; and all this morality is preposterous in form, because it addresses itself to all and generalises what does not admit of generalisation. Kant gave us a guiding rule with his categorical imperative. But this rule has failed us. It is of no use saying to us: Act as others ought to act in this case. For we know that there are not and cannot be such things as identical actions, but that every action is unique in its nature, so that any precept can only apply to the rough outside of actions.