Part 11

"The serpent that cannot slough must die. In the same way, the spirits which are prevented from changing their opinions cease to be spirits."

So we must expect that if Nietzsche had been permitted to continue longer in health, he would have cast off the slough of his immoralism and the negative conceptions of his positivism. His Zarathustra was the last work of his pen, but it is only the most classical expression of the fermentation of his soul, not the final purified result of his philosophy; it is not the solution of the problem that stirred his heart.

While writing his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Nietzsche characterizes his method of work thus:

"That I proceed with my outpourings considerably like a dilettante and in an immature manner, I know very well, but I am anxious first of all to get rid of the whole polemico-negative material. I wish undisturbedly to sing off, up and down and truly dastardly, the whole gamut of my hostile feelings, 'that the vaults shall echo back.' Later on, i. e., within five years, I shall discard all polemics and bethink myself of a really 'good work,' But at present my breast is oppressed with disgust and tribulation. I must expectorate, decorously and indecorously, but radically and for good" [endgültig].

The writings of Nietzsche will make the impression of a youthful immaturity upon any half-way serious reader. There is a hankering after originality which of necessity leads to aberrations and a sovereign contempt for the merits of the past. The world seems endangered, and yet any one who would seriously try to live up to Nietzsche's ideal must naturally sober down after a while, and we may apply to him what Mephistopheles says of the baccalaureus:

"Yet even from him we're not in special peril He will, ere long, to other thoughts incline. The must may foam absurdly in the barrel. Nathless, it turns at last to wine." Tr. by Bayard Taylor.

Nietzsche did not live long enough to experience a period of matured thought. He died before the fermentation of his mind had come to its normal close, and so his life will remain forever a great torso, without intrinsic worth, but suggestive and appealing only to the immature, including the "herd animal" who would like to be an overman.

The very immaturity of Nietzsche's view becomes attractive to immature minds. He wrote while his thoughts were still in a state of fermentation, and he died before the wine of his soul was clarified.

Nietzsche is an almost tragic figure that will live in art as a brooding thinker, a representative of the dissatisfied, a man of an insatiable love of life, with wild and unsteady looks, proud in his indomitable self-assertion, but broken in body and spirit. Such he was in his last disease when his mind was wrapt in the eternal night of dementia, the oppressive consciousness of which made him exclaim in lucid moments the pitiable complaint. "Mutter, ich bin dumm" As such he is represented in Klein's statue, which in its pathetic posture is a psychological masterpiece.

Nietzsche's works are poetic effusions more than philosophical expositions and yet we would hesitate to call him a poet. His poems are not poetical in the usual sense. They lack poetry and yet they appeal not only to his admirers, but also to his critics and enemies. Most of them are artificial yet they are so characteristic that they are interesting specimens of a peculiar kind of taste. They strike us as ingenious, because they reflect his eccentricities.

In a poem entitled "Ecce Homo" he characterizes himself:

"Yea, I know from whence I came! Never satiate, like the flame Glow I and consume me too Into light turns what I find, Cinders do I leave behind, Flame am I, 'tis surely true."

E.g.:

"Bitte nie! Lass dies Gewimmer! Nimm, ich bitte dich, nimm immer!"

Compare Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Leben, pp. 90-97.

(See, e. g., Leben, II., 1, pp. 108-111.) "Nach dem Kriege missfiel mir der Luxus, die Franzosenverachtung," etc., p. 108. "Ich halte das jetzige Preussen für eine der Cultur höchst gefährliche Macht." Nietzsche ridicules the German language as barbarous in sound (La Gaya Scienza, pp. 138-140), "wälderhaft, heiser, wie aus räucherigen Stuben und unhöflichen Gegenden." Unique is the origin of the standard style of modern high German from the bureaucratic slang, "kanzleimässig schreiben, das war etwas Vornehmes" (La Gaya Scienza, p. 138), and at present the German changes into an "Offizierdeutsch" (ibid., p. 139). Nietzsche suspects, "the German depth," "die deutsche Tiefe," to be a mere mental dyspepsia (see "Jenseits von Gut und Böse," p. 211), saying, "Der Deutsche verdaut seine Ereignisse schlecht, or wird nie damit fertig; die deutsche Tiefe ist oft nur eine schwere, zögernde Verdauung." Nevertheless, he holds that the old-fashioned German depth is better than modern Prussian "Schneidigkeit und Berliner Witz und Sand." He prefers the company of the Swiss to that of his countrymen. (See also "Was den Deutschen abgeht," Vol. 8, p. 108.)

"Unser lieber König," "der Landesvater," etc. See Leben, I., p. 24, and IL, 1, p. 248, "Unser lieber alter Kaiser Wilhelm," and "wir Preussen waren wirklich stolz." These expressions occur in Nietzsche's description of the Emperor's appearance at Bayreuth.

E.g., "Auch der schädlichste Mensch ist vielleicht immer noch der allernützlichste in Hinsicht auf Erhaltung der Art," etc. La Gaya Scienza, p. 3 ff.

"Ich bin so gar nicht zum Hassen und zum Feind sein gemacht!"

See, e. g., Leben, I., p. 135, where he speaks of a new "Freigeisterei," denouncing the "libres penseurs" as "unverbesserliche Flachköpfe und Hanswürste," adding, "Sie glauben allesammt noch an's 'Ideal.'"

"Dass das Gewölbe wiederhallt,"--a quotation from Goethe's "Faust."

Reproduced as the frontispiece of this book.

"Ja, ich weiss woher ich stamme! Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme, Glühe und verzehr ich mich, licht wird alles was ich fasse, Kohle alles was ich lasse: Flamme bin ich sicherlich!"

NIETZSCHE'S PREDECESSOR

Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra and the inventor of the new ideal called the "overman," is commonly regarded as the most extreme egotist, to whom morality is non-existent and who glories in the coming of the day in which a man of his liking--the overman--would live au grand jour. His philosophy is an individualism carried to its utmost extreme, sanctioning egotism, denouncing altruism and establishing the right of the strong to trample the weak under foot. It is little known, however, that he followed another thinker, Johann Caspar Schmidt, whose extreme individualism he adopted. But this forerunner who preached a philosophy of the sovereignty of self and an utter disregard of our neighbors' rights remained unheeded; he lived in obscurity, he died in poverty, and under the pseudonym "Max Stirner" he left behind a book entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigentum.

The historian Lange briefly mentioned him in his History of Materialism, and the novelist John Henry Mackay followed up the reference which led to the discovery of this lonely comet on the philosophical sky.

The strangest thing about this remarkable book consists in the many coincidences with Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. It is commonly deemed impossible that the famous spokesman of the overman should not have been thoroughly familiar with this failure in the philosophical book market; but while Stirner was forgotten the same ideas transplanted into the volumes of the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra found an echo first in Germany and soon afterwards all over the world.