Nietzsche: His Life and Works

Chapter I. Life and Works

Life and Works

"Holy be thy name to all coming generations! In the name of all thy friends, I, thy pupil, cry out our warmest thanks to thee for thy great life.

"Thou wast one of the noblest and purest men that ever trod this earth.

"And although this is known to both friend and foe, I do not deem it superfluous to utter this testimony aloud at thy tomb. For we know the world; we know the fate of Spinoza! Around Nietzsche's memory, too, posterity may cast shadows! And therefore I close with the words: Peace to thy ashes!"

This view, expressed by Peter Gast, Nietzsche's staunchest friend and disciple, at his master's graveside, in August 1900, may be regarded as typical of the Nietzsche enthusiast's attitude towards his master. On the other hand we have the assurance of Nietzsche's opponents and enemies that nothing could have been more utterly disastrous to modern society, more pernicious, dangerous, and ridiculous than Nietzsche's life-work.

At the present day Nietzsche is so potent a force and his influence is increasing with such rapidity that, whatever our calling in life may be, it behoves us to know precisely what he stands for, and to which of the opinions above given we should subscribe. As a matter of fact, the inquirer into the life and works of this interesting man will find that he has well-nigh as many by-names as he has readers, and not the least of our difficulties in speaking about him will be to give him a fitting title, descriptive of his mission and the way in which he understood it.

Some deny his right to the title "philosopher"; others declare him to be a mere anarchist; and a large number regard all his later works as no more than a shallow though brilliant reversal of every accepted doctrine on earth.

In order to be able to provoke so much diversity of opinion, a man must be not only versatile but forcible. Nietzsche was both. There is scarcely a subject in the whole range of philosophical thought which he does not attack and blow up; and he hurls forth his hard, polished missiles in a manner so destructive, and at the same time with such accuracy of aim, that it is no wonder a chorus of ill-used strongholds of traditional thought now cry out against him as a disturber and annihilator of their peace. Yet, through all the dust, smoke, and noise of his implacable warfare, there are both a method and a mission to be discerned--a method and a mission in the pursuit of which Nietzsche is really as unswerving as he seems capricious.

Throughout his life and all his many recantations and revulsions of feeling, he remained faithful to one purpose and to one aim--the elevation of the type man. However bewildered we may become beneath the hail of his epigrams, treating of every momentous question that has ever agitated the human mind, we still can trace this broad principle running through all his works: his desire to elevate man and to make him more worthy of humanity's great past.

Even in his attack on English psychologists, naturalists, and philosophers, in The Genealogy of Morals, what are his charges against them? He says they debase man, voluntarily or involuntarily, by seeking the really operative, really imperative and decisive factor in history precisely where the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it, i.e. in vis inertiæ, in some blind and accidental mechanism of ideas, in automatic and purely passive adaptation and modification, in the compulsory action of adjustment to environment.

Again, in his attack on the evolutionists' so-called "struggle for existence," of which I shall speak more exhaustively later, it is the suggestion that life--mere existence in itself--is worthy of being an aim at all, that he deprecates so profoundly. And, once more, it is with the view of elevating man and his aspirations that he levels the attack.

Whatever we may think of his methods, therefore, at least his aim was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and we must bear in mind that he never shirked the duties which, rightly or wrongly, he imagined would help him to achieve it.

What was Nietzsche? If we accept his own definition of the philosopher's task on earth, we must place him in the front rank of philosophers. For, according to him, the creation of new values, new principles, new standards, is the philosopher's sole raison d'être; and this he certainly accomplished. If, on the other hand, with all the "school" philosophers, we ask him to show us his system, we shall most surely be disappointed. In this respect, therefore, we may perhaps need to modify our opinion of him.

Be that as it may, it is safe to maintain that he was a poet of no mean order; not a mere versifier or rhapsodist, but a poet in the old Greek sense of the word, i.e. a maker, in our time such men are so rare that we are apt to question whether they exist at all, for poetasters have destroyed our faith in them. Goethe was perhaps the last example of the type in modern Europe, and although we may recall the scientific achievements of men like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo, we are not sufficiently ready to associate their divining and intuitive power in the department of science with their purely artistic and poetic achievements, despite the fact that the two are really inseparable.

Knowing the high authority with which poets of this order are wont to sneak, it might be supposed that we should approach Nietzsche's innovations in the realm of science with some respect, not in spite of, but precisely owing to, his great poetic genius. Unfortunately to-day this no longer follows. Too thoroughly have we divorced science from emotion and feeling (very wrongly, as even Herbert Spencer and Buckle both declared), and now, wherever we see emotion or a suggestion of passion, we are too apt to purse our lips and stand on our guard.

When we consider that Nietzsche was ultimately to prove the bitterest enemy of Christianity, and the severest critic of the ecclesiastic, his antecedents seem, to say the least, remarkable. His father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, born in 1813, was a clergyman of the German Protestant Church; his grandfather had also taken orders; whilst his grandmother on his father's side was descended from a long line of parsons. Nor do things change very much when we turn to his mother's family; for his maternal grandfather, Oehler, was also a clergyman, and, according to Nietzsche's sister, he appears to have been a very sound, though broad, theologian.

Yet, perhaps, it is we who are wrong in seeing anything strange in the fact that a man with such orthodox antecedents should have developed into a prophet and reformer of Nietzsche's stamp; for we should remember that only a long tradition of discipline and strict conventionality, lasting over a number of generations, is able to rear that will-power and determination which, as the lives of most great men have shown, are the first conditions of all epoch-making movements started by single individuals.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born at Röcken near Lützen, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on the 15th of October 1844. From his earliest childhood onwards the boy seems to have been robust and active and does not appear to have suffered from any of the ordinary ailments of infancy. In the biography written by his sister much stress is laid upon this fact, while the sometimes exceptional health enjoyed by his parents and ancestors is duly emphasised by the anxious biographer. Elisabeth Nietzsche (born in July 1846), the biographer in question, is perfectly justified in establishing these facts with care; for we know that our poet philosopher died insane, and many have sought to show that his insanity was hereditary and could be traced throughout his works.

Nietzsche's father died in 1849, and in the following year the family removed to Naumburg. There the boy received his early schooling, first at a preparatory school and subsequently at the Gymnasium--the Grammar School--of the town. As a lad, it is said that he was fond of military games, and of sitting alone, and it appears that he would recline for hours at his grandmother Nietzsche's feet, listening to her reminiscences of the great Napoleon. Towards the end of 1858 Mrs. Nietzsche was offered a scholarship for her son, for a term of six years, in the Landes-Schule, Pforta, so famous for the scholars it produced. At Pforta, where the discipline was very severe, the boy followed the regular school course and worked with great industry. His sister tells us that during this period he distinguished himself most in his private studies and artistic efforts, though even in the ordinary work of the school he was decidedly above the average. It was here, too, that he first became acquainted with Wagner's compositions, and a word ought now perhaps to be said in regard to his musical studies.

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