Part 14

Virtues like races--perhaps I should say with races--have their ascendancy and their decline. The quality of pity is not greatly admired of strong young peoples. The virtues of triumphant pagandom were made of sterner stuff: one hears much of temperance, of courage, of wisdom, of justice; little indeed of compassion. It is with Christianity that faith, hope, and charity are introduced into our culture, and throughout Christendom the greatest of these remains charity. Thus it is that Nietzsche always refers to these virtues as the “modern idea,” and since modernity is to his mind desperately sick, he seeks the cause of its disease in its “fixed idea.”

Now in imagining that charity or pity might well be a symptom of weakness, Nietzsche does not stand alone even among modern thinkers. Spinoza for one is inclined to be critical of the excellence of pity. Why pity one’s neighbor more than oneself? And Why pity oneself at all? Is not such self-pity a form of repining? But the cure for repining is understanding--the understanding that all things are of God. One might as well regret that the area of one’s field is not greater than the product of its base and side, as that the length of one’s days does not exceed three-score years and ten. And Kant again is no sympathetic witness to the virtue of pity. “There is but one thing good,” he has said, “and that is a good will”--the will, namely, to obey the command of duty. If one have this one cannot need pity; if one have it not one cannot deserve pity.

But Spinoza and Kant are in this, as in other respects, exceptions to the soft mood of modern sentiment. With Schopenhauer, the very embodiment of modernity, we have seen pity once more set on high as the unselfish virtue. It is the self-less man that becomes the holy man; it is the holy man that becomes the sage, denying the world with its pitiless Will-to-live.

Now it is against this very philosophy of Schopenhauer, against this conception of the beauty and wisdom of self-surrender that Nietzsche reacts. If to Spinoza pity is a folly, if to Kant it is a superfluity, to Nietzsche it is a vice--more than a vice, a disease, that deep sickness of modernity which spells decadence. Schopenhauer, and all that older wisdom which Schopenhauer loved, of Jesus and of Buddha, these were Nietzsche’s great denials, these were the false physicians of the soul that had made the soul sick in making it sad.

If Nietzsche reacts so violently against the teaching of Schopenhauer, it is not because he is by nature precluded from appreciating its seduction. It is rather because he had at one time in his life too deeply understood and too completely yielded to its soothing counsel of surrender that he later bends all his energies to its destruction. This complete revulsion of feeling was not a unique episode in Nietzsche’s experience. On the contrary his intellectual life is largely a history of such accepting and rejecting. Born into a clergyman’s family, passing his childhood in quiet Naumburg, Nietzsche in his last years claims the name of Antichrist. Eagerly connecting himself in his student days at Bonn with one of those corps that treasured the republican ideals of ’48, he advocates in his later years a social organization modeled on the caste-system of the East. An ardent patriot in ’70, he becomes the contemner of the organized state in general, a contemptuous critic of Germanism in particular. A trained student of history, a distinguished professor of philology at Basel, some of his most cunning and cutting analyses expose the weakness of the learned temperament. In his first important work, “The Birth of Tragedy,” we find him an apostle of Wagner; his later “Case of Wagner” is perhaps the cruelest polemic against a man and his art of which modern letters give example.

The bare enumeration of these changes is bound to leave an impression of waywardness. Yet this impression would be in so far false that it is clear each accepting was a matter of deep feeling with Nietzsche, each rejecting cost its price. At times, to be sure, he would put on a brave front before the spectacle of his thought’s inconstancy. Only those that can change can grow: “I love those that change,” he writes. But at other times there is more of melancholy in his recalling of abandoned ideals. “If thinking be thy destiny, then honor that destiny with divine honors; sacrifice to it thy best and thy dearest.” It is not without reason that he calls the progress of his thoughts a “Selbstüberwindung” and one may best understand the fierce bitterness of his attack upon those he has put behind him if one remember that nothing less than hatred could replace an old love in this too tenacious heart.

It is then of a piece with the rest, if a philosophy which in the end represented the dearest foe of his thought should have been the friend and guide of Nietzsche’s youth. How deep a meaning Schopenhauer had once possessed for him may be judged from the following extracts. The first is from a letter written in 1867 to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff on the occasion of the death of von Gersdorff’s brother:

“Perhaps this death is the greatest grief that could have come to you. And now, dear friend, you have experienced for yourself--I gather from the tenor of your letter--why our Schopenhauer esteems pain and trouble a great gift of fate, the δεύτερος πλοῦς to the resigning of the will. You too have felt and lived through the enlightening, deeply quieting and settling power of pain. It is a time in which you can yourself try out the teaching of Schopenhauer. If the fourth book of his masterpiece now make on you an ugly disturbing downweighing impression, if it have not the power to uplift you, to carry you through outer violent grief to that chastened yet serene mood that comes over us as we listen to noble music, to that mood in which one feels the earthy shell to have dropped from one,--then I too will have no more of this philosophy. Only the deeply suffering can and may speak the final word on such matters. The rest of us standing in the current of things, only longing for that denial of the will as for the blessed isles, can not judge whether the solace of such philosophy is adequate to times of deep sorrow.”

And some three years later, Nietzsche invalided home from the hospital corps of the Prussian army writes to this same friend at the front: “This morning brought me the happiest surprise and a relief from much inquietude and anxiety--your letter.... Everything that you write affects me deeply, above all the sincere earnest tone with which you speak of this test by fire of our common philosophy of life. I too have been through a like experience, for me too these months have proved a time in which my beliefs have shown themselves deep-rooted. One can die with them; that means much more than saying, one can live by them.”

One may die by the light of Schopenhauerian principles! To die by them--the taunt comes from an older Nietzsche--is all that one can do with them. But by this later time, dying, voluntary dying, dying with the breath still left in the body--all this has lost its charm for Nietzsche. He is now all for living; for more than living, for fighting; for conquering; for, if need be, killing.

“One who like me,” he writes in these later days, “has long busied himself with curious interest in thinking out pessimism to its bitter end ... has probably in this very pursuit--without precisely having willed it--turned his eyes toward the opposite ideal: toward the ideal of the most domineering, the most living, the most aggressive of men, toward him who has not merely reconciled and adjusted himself to things as they are and have been; but who wants more of them, just as they are and have been--more in all eternity, crying insatiably da capo not to his own life only, but to the whole scene and all the play.”

The passage is not without a hint of Nietzsche’s personal psychology. No doubt he loved contrast for the sake of contrast; no doubt he loved drama--particularly the dramatic conflict of ideas--for the play’s sake; no doubt he loved paradox not a little for its noise. Yet it is not hard for the student to make out motives deeper than the personal, and more general, that impelled Nietzsche to turn his eyes from the ethics of self-sacrifice to the opposite ideal, to the ideal of “the most living, the most aggressive of men,” to the ideal of the “Caesarian Conqueror.”

* * * * *

No understanding of these motives can leave out of account the great scientific idea that had made its appearance in the nineteenth century--the idea of organic evolution. It is difficult to overestimate the suggestion that would lie in such an idea for one imbued with the thought of Schopenhauer. In its Darwinian form, the essential mechanism of evolution is seen to be a struggle, a war between race and race, between individual and individual. That such warfare is the necessary expression of the will to live, the most universal principle of that troubled phenomenon we call nature, Schopenhauer had indeed grasped, had insisted upon, had made the cornerstone of his theory of life. But then Schopenhauer had dwelt with equal insistence on the uselessness, the irrationality of the struggle. It was all cruel, then, nowhere benign, because nowhere directed toward an end. But now a purpose in the struggle is just what the evolutionary hypothesis seems to suggest. What if life’s pitiless cruelty were justified as the indispensable means to a supreme end--the end namely of producing a being higher than any of those that take part in it? By the selection of the fittest, would not this warfare result in the production of the superior? And if the superior could be produced only at the cost of the inferior, is there not in this sacrifice something more than wanton and irrational cruelty?

It is little wonder that one already impressed with the “self-contradiction” involved in a will not to live should seize upon this suggestion. “I bring you a goal,” cries Zarathustra. And this goal he calls the “Uebermensch.”

“I preach to you the Superman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

“All things before you have produced something beyond themselves, and would you be the ebb of this great flood? Would you rather go back to the animal than overcome man?

“What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame.

“You have traveled the way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm....

“Lo, I preach to you the Superman.

“The Superman is the meaning of the earth.”

* * * * *

To produce the higher race! that is “the meaning of the earth,” the meaning that Schopenhauer had missed, that only one coming after Darwin could have seized; a meaning that does not mask the cruelty of life, yet takes from it its tragedy--the tragedy of senseless casual pain.

But now that we have found the goal, we may also define the worth of life and its duties. In deducing these we meet the most astonishing “Umwerthung aller Werthe,” the complete inversion of those notions of worth which we dwellers in Christendom have inherited. “I sit,” says Zarathustra, “with old shattered tables of the law around me--and with new tables, too, half made out.” We approach an understanding of Nietzsche’s meaning when he wrote that God and man dies of pity. For if with him we make whatever promotes progress toward the superman our good, whatever retards it our evil, then must it not be that a pity which spares the weak for pity’s sake is the very vice, the moral disease, which makes for decadence? Is not pity the anodyne of those who despair of life, and is not hope in the future necessarily cruel?

Before we who are of necessity touched with modernity react against a doctrine so little in accord with our profession of self-sacrifice, it would be well to ask ourselves how seriously we take this our profession. Is the quality of mercy indeed never strained for us? For example, are we citizens of a young and prosperous country eager to throw open its doors to the unhappy dregs of outworn lands and exhausted civilizations? For this would be the charitable thing to do. How many are prepared to encourage the mentally unsound or physically diseased to propagate? Yet pity must deny itself something if it would condemn misfortune to wed loneliness.

To be sure one expects at this point to hear of “the deeper pity”; to be told that such deeper pity must let some perish in their misery that more may not be made wretched. Even so, we have passed from the doctrine of the supremacy of charity to the theory of “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” Already we must occasionally cry with Nietzsche, “Be hard!” and must at moments understand his phrase, “The will not-to-help may be higher than the sympathy that springs to aid.”

And we might carry our criticism of sympathy a step further. What sanction has the formula “the greatest happiness to the greatest number”? Obviously, the sanction of the approval of the greatest number; it is the complete expression of the egoism of the mob. But egoism for egoism, is there anything to recommend the ideal of the mob as against that of the exceptional being? Surely, if we make progress our guide, those who have done the most to bring about modern conditions are just those whom the mob has condemned and suppressed as working against its welfare. Socrates was poisoned, Jesus crucified, Caesar assassinated, Bruno burned, Napoleon isolated, for their crimes. It makes little difference whether the crime was against the state, the priestly tradition, the republic, the church, the nations; the power to punish in each case came from the masses. Each of these conquerors was and had to be a pitiless egoist, hesitating not at all to overturn the world of his day for the sake of his own ideal. Looking back on these historic figures, one is tempted to say that the glory of the world abides in its criminals, those lonely men, those egoists.

If I have included the gentle figure of Jesus in a list of the conquerors, it is not because Nietzsche would regard him as one who had made for the world’s progress, however much he may have contributed to its history. Nietzsche would, however, include the founder of the gospel of love among the master egoists. Of course, modernity will cry paradox! “Granted,” it will say, “granted he brought a sword into the world, was it not an enormous pity for the humanity that was to be that moved him to destroy the world that was, and with it, himself?”