Nietzsche the thinker; a study

Preface

Criticism of Nietzsche is rife, understanding rare; this book is a contribution to the understanding of him. At the same time I have tried not merely to restate his thoughts, but to re-think them, using more or less my own language. To enable those interested to judge of the correctness of the interpretation, the original passages are referred to almost constantly. I limit myself to his fundamental points of view — noting only in passing or not at all his thoughts on education, his later views of art and music, his conception of woman, his interpretation of Christianity and attitude to religion.

If I differ from some who have written in English upon him, it is partly in a sense of the difficulty and delicacy of the undertaking. Few appear to have thought it worth while to study Nietzsche — the treatment he commonly receives is (to use an expressive German word, for which I know no good short equivalent) "plump." If I should be myself found — by those who know — to have simplified him at times too much and not done justice to all his nuances, I should not protest and only hope that some day some one will do better.

The book was in substance written before the present European War, and without a thought of such a monstrous possibility. It has become the fashion to connect Nietzsche closely with it. One American professor has even called it — the German side of it — " Nietzsche in Action" and an early book by a group of Oxford scholars, Why We Are at War, was advertised under the heading ' ' The Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War." But as matter of fact, the war would probably have arisen about as it did and been conducted about as it has been, had he never existed; and so far as I can find him touching it in any special way, it is as a diagnostician of the general conditions which appear to have given birth to it — i.e., what he calls " Europe's system of small states and small politics" (in contrast to a united Europe and a vi PREFACE

great politics, on which he set his heart), ''this nevrose nationale with which Europe is sick/' "this sickness and unreason which is the strongest force against culture that exists, nationalism," for perpetuating which he holds Germans largely [perhaps too much] responsible, and "which with the founding of the German Empire passed into a critical state" (Ecce Homo, XII, x, §2-, Twilight of the Idols, ix, §39). These last words may perhaps be said to suggest some such catastrophe as has now taken place, and I know of no other passage that foreshadows it more particularly. I have dealt with the subject in a special article elsewhere ("Nietzsche and the War," International Journal of Ethics, April, 1917). That our own country has now been drawn — forced — into the maelstrom does not alter its essential character.

As to the final disposition of Nietzsche, I offer no counsels now, and really, as intimated, counsels — criticism, such as it is — abound. Even one's newspaper will usually put him in his place! Or, if one wishes a book, Mr. Paul Elmer More's Nietzsche, "compact as David's pebble," will serve, the Harvard Graduates' Magazine tells us, "to slay the Nietzschean giant," and if we desire heavier blows, — I will not say they are more skilful — we may take up Dr. Paul Carus's Nietzsche and Other Exponents of Individualism. What, however, does not seem to abound is knowledge of the object slain, or to be slain, i.e., some elementary and measurably clear idea of who, or rather what, Nietzsche was, particularly in his underlying points of view. And even the present fresh attempt in this direction — for others have preceded me, notably Dr. Dolson, Mr. Ludovici, Miss Hamblen, Dr. Chatterton-Hill, Dr. A. Wolf, author of the best extant monograph on Nietzsche, and Professor H. L. Stewart, whose eye, however, is rather too much on present controversial issues for scientific purposes — would be a work of supererogation, had Nietzsche ever given us an epitome of his thinking himself, or were Professor Raoul Richter's masterly Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leoen und sein Werk translated into English, or were Professor Henri Lichtenberger's admirable La Philosophic de Nietzsche, which has been translated, a little more extended and thoroughgoing — at least, my book could then only beg consideration from Americans as a piece of "home industry."

PREFACE vii

As for criticism — unquestionably the thing of final moment in relation to every thinker — if I can only help to make it in this case a little more intelligent in the future, I shall for the present be satisfied.

I owe thanks to Mr. Thomas Common of Corstorphine, Scotland — perhaps the first English-speaking Nietzsche scholar of our day, ''first" in both senses of the word — for help in locating passages from the Works, which I omitted to note the source of in first coming upon them and could not afterward find, or which I came upon in other writers on Nietzsche. Unfortunately a few remain unlocated — also some from the Briefe. Acknowledgments are due to the editors of The Hibbert Journal, The International Journal of Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, and Mind for permission to use material which originally appeared as articles in those periodicals.

Though gratefully recognizing the enterprise of Dr. Oscar Levy in making possible an English translation of the greater part of Nietzsche's Werke, I have used the original German editions, making my own translations or versions — save of poetical passages, where I have been glad to follow, with his permission, Mr. Common. I cite, however, as far as possible, by paragraph or section, the same in the Werke (both octavo and pocket editions) and the English, French, and other translations; the posthumous material, except Will to Power and Ecce Homo, I am obliged to cite by volume and page of the German octavo edition (vols. IX-XIV inclusive — the second eds. of IX to XII), where alone it appears in full. I have also drawn on Nietzsche's Briefe (6 vols.). The recently published Philologica (3 vols.), principally records of his University teaching, I have practically left unutilized. The numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) in the text refer to the bottom of the page, the letters (a, b, c, etc.) to notes at the end of the book. <( Werke means the octavo edition, unless otherwise stated.

W. M. S.

Silver Lake, New Hampshire, June, 1917.

j j

Contents

INTRODUCTORY

CHAPTER PAGE

. I Nietzsche's Relation to His Time; His Life and Personal Tbaits 1

Chapter I Nietzsche's Relation To His Time; His Life And Personal Traits

Once when about to give a "Nietzsche" course before a university audience, those in charge suggested to me — a novice in such situations — that I should begin by considering some of the notable aspects or tendencies of our present civilization which Nietzsche expresses, so as to give a raison d'etre for the course. It seemed to be taken for granted that he reflected the age and was chiefly important as illustration — perhaps as warning. I confess that I was somewhat embarrassed. For what had struck me as I had been reading him was that he went more or less counter to most of the distinctive tendencies of our time. My personal experience had been of shock after shock. Long before, and when he was little more than a name to me, I had spoken of the idea of getting "beyond good and evil" as naturally landing one in a madhouse; and when I first read him and ventured to lecture on him before an Ethical Society (1907), I could only consider him as an enemy who stood "strikingly and brilliantly for what we do not believe."

As afterward I came to know him more thoroughly, I was less willing to pass sweeping judgment upon him, and yet the impression only deepened that here was a force antagonistic to the dominant forces about us. At many points he seemed more mediaeval than modern. He failed to share the early nineteenth century enthusiasm for liberty, and he opposed the later socialistic tendency. He regretted the intensification of the nationalist spirit which set in among the various European countries after the defeat of Napoleon, deeming it reactionary — his ideas were super-national, European. He found retrogression in Germany, and belabored the Empire and the new DeutscJitJium. He shared, indeed, the modern scientific spirit, but he could not long content himself with a purely scientific philosophy and deplored the lapse of German philosophy into " criticism' ' and scientific specialism. Of Darwinism I might say that he accepted it and did not accept it, whether as natural history or as morals, regarding the struggle for existence, unhindered by ideal considerations, as favoring, through overemphasis of the social virtues, the survival of the weak rather than the strong. In the religious field, the tendency today is, amid uncertainties about Christian dogma, to emphasize Christian morality — Nietzsche questioned Christian morality itself. In business relations the time is marked by commercialism and a certain ruthless egoism (on all sides), but Nietzsche, though with an occasional qualification, had something of the feeling of an old-time aristocrat for the commercial spirit; he lamented the effect of our "American gold-hunger" upon Europe; he thought that one trouble with Germany was that there were too many traders there, paying producers the lowest and charging consumers the highest price ; he wished a political order that would control egoisms, whether high or low. War, at least till the present monstrous one, has not characterized our age more than others, but there have been wars enough — and Nietzsche found most of them ignoble : trade, combined with narrow nationalistic aims, inspires them — the peoples having become like traders who lie in wait to take advantage of one another ; 1 the present war he would probably have found not unlike the rest. All this, though he held that the warlike instinct, in some form or other, belonged essentially to human nature as to all advancing life, and that in all probability war in the literal sense would have worthy occasion in the future.

The fact is that Nietzsche was a markedly individual thinker and lived to an extraordinary extent from within. While it would be venturesome to say that there is anything new in him and a subtle chemistry might perhaps trace every thought or impulse of his to some external source, the sources 1 Thus spake Zarathustra, III, xii, § 21.

RELATION TO HIS TIME 3

lay to a relatively slight extent in his immediate environment.* Unquestionably he was influenced by Schopenhauer and by Wagner; but it was not long before he was critical toward them both. Late in life he remarked that to be a philosopher one must be capable of great admirations, but must also have a force of opposition — and he thought that he had stood the tests, as he had allowed himself to be alienated from his principal concern, neither by the great political movement of Germany, nor by the artistic movement of Wagner, nor by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, though his experiences had been hard and at times he was ill. 2b In another retrospection he says that while like Wagner he was a child of his time, hence a decadent, he had known how to defend himself against the fatality. 3 So slight did he feel his contact with the time to be, so imperceptible was his influence, so profound his isolation, particularly in his later years, that he spoke of himself as an "accident" among Germans, and said with a touch of humor, "My time is not yet, some are posthumously born." 4 I cannot make out that his influence is appreciable now — at least in English-speaking countries ; even in Germany, where for a time he had a certain vogue, his counsels and ideas have been far more disregarded than followed — and though in the present war some university-bred soldiers may be inspired by his praise of the warrior-spirit and the manly virtues, men from Oxford might be similarly inspired, if they but knew him. d He has indeed, given a phrase and perhaps an idea or two to Mr Bernard Shaw, a few scattering scholars have got track of him ' (I know of but two or three in America), the great newspaper and magazine-writing and reading world has picked up a few of his phrases, which it does not understand, like ' ' superman, ' "blond beast," "will to power," "beyond good and evil,' " transvaluation of values" — but influence is another matter He has changed nothing, whether in thought or public policy has neither lifted men up nor lowered them, though mistaken images of him may have had occasionally the latter effect, the truth being simply that he is out of most men's ken.

a Letters here and elsewhere refer to notes to be found at end of book.

8 Preface to " The Case of Wagner."

4 "Nietzsche contra Wagner," § 7, Ecce Homo, III, § 1.

But because a man, however much talked about, has had slight real influence, having gone mostly counter to the currents of his time, it does not follow that he is not important, even vastly so, and that the future will not take large account of him. I do not wish to prophesy, but I have a suspicion that sometime — perhaps at no very distant date — writers on serious themes will be more or less classified according as they know him or not ; that we shall be speaking of a pre-Nietzschean and a post-Nietzschean period in philosophical, and particularly in ethical and social, analysis and speculation — and that those who have not made their reckoning with him will be as hopelessly out of date as those who have failed similarly with Kant. Already I am conscious for my own part of a certain antiquated air in much of our contemporary discussion — it is unaware of the new and deep problems which Nietzsche raises; and the references made to him (for almost every writer seems to feel that he must refer to him) only show how superficial the acquaintance with him ordinarily is. Far am I from asserting that we shall follow him ; I simply mean that we shall know him, ponder over him, perchance grapple with him — and whether he masters us or we him, the strength of the struggle and the illumination born of it will become part of our better intellectual selves.

n

Although this book is no biography of Nietzsche (save in the spiritual sense), it may be well at the outset to state the main facts of his life, and also to mention some of the striking points in his personal character.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Rocken, a small Prussian village, where his father was a Protestant pastor. His mother was a pastor's daughter — and back of his father on both sides there was a current of theological blood. From his fourteenth to his twentieth year he was at Schulpforta, one of the strictest and best of German preparatory schools. At twenty he went to the University at Bonn, matriculating as a student of theology and philosophy. A year later he followed his " great" teacher, Ritschl, to Leipzig, having meanwhile concentrated upon philosophical and philological

LIFE 5

study, and producing during his two years there learned treatises which were published in the Rheinisches Museum ("Zur Geschichte der Theognidischen Spruchsammlung, " Vol. XXII; "De Laertii Diogenis fontibus," Vols. XXIII, XXIV). While in Leipzig he read Schopenhauer, and met Wagner. His university work was broken only by a period of military service. Before taking the doctor's degree, he was called to the chair of classical philology in the University at Basel, his philological work having attracted attention and Ritschl saying that he could do what he would. He was now twenty-four (1868). The Leipzig faculty forthwith gave him the doctor's degree without examination. After two years he became Professor ordinarius. He also undertook work in the Basel Padagogium (a kind of higher gymnasium). His acquaintance with Wagner now ripened into an intimate friendship — Wagner living not far away on Lake Lucerne. In 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, he could not serve his country as soldier, since he had become naturalized in Switzerland, but he entered the ambulance-service. Dysentery and diphtheria, however, attacked him — and the after-effects lingered long, if not throughout his life. In 1876, the year also of the Bayreuth opening, and when differences which had been developing with Wagner culminated, he was obliged on account of ill-health to relinquish his work at the Padagogium and in the spring of 1879 he resigned his professorship in the University as well. He was at this time thirty-five, but to his sister who saw him not long after, he seemed old and broken, "ein gebrocliener, milder, gealteter Mann." His outer movements were thereafter largely determined by considerations of health. He spent the summers usually in the Upper Engadine, and winters on the French or Italian Riviera. He lasted nearly ten years, when he was overtaken by a stroke of paralysis which affected the brain (late December, 1888, or early January, 1889, in Turin). His naturally vigorous bodily frame withstood actual death till August 25, 1900.

Owing to current misapprehension a special word should be said as to his insanity. The popular impression among us is perhaps largely traceable to a widely read book by a semiscientific writer, Dr. Max Nordau, entitled (in the English translation, which appeared twenty or more years ago) Degeneration; in a chapter devoted to Nietzsche it was stated that his works had been written between periods of residence in a madhouse. The legend dies hard and lingers on faintly in the latest writers who have not made any real study of the case. The fact is, that the insanity came, as just indicated, suddenly, almost without warning, for his latest writings are some of his most lucid — and that nothing was produced by him afterward, save a few incoherent notes and letters, written or scrawled in the first days of his dementia. That there are any anticipations of the catastrophe (i.e., signs of incipient dementia) in his books is at best a subjective opinion — indeed it is a view which tends to be abandoned more and more. f Highly wrought Nietzsche often was, particularly in his latest writings; he said extravagant things and uttered violent judgments. So did Carlyle; so have many earnest, lonely men, struggling unequally with their time ; but insanity is another matter.

The causes of his collapse were probably manifold. A few circumstances may be mentioned which may have co-operated to produce the result. Nietzsche himself mentions a decadent inheritance which he had from his father, though he thought it counterbalanced by a robust one from his mother. 5 While serving his time in the Prussian artillery, he suffered a grave rupture of muscles of the chest in mounting a restive horse, and for a time his life was in danger. During the Franco-Prussian war, the illnesses already mentioned were aggravated by strong medicines that seem to have permanently deranged his digestion ; in any case, sick-headaches of an intense and often prolonged character became frequent. He had serious eye-troubles (he was always nearsighted), and became almost blind late in life. Strain of this and every kind produced insomnia — and this in turn led to the use of drugs, and of stronger and stronger ones. All the time he was leading the intensest intellectual life. Whether such a combination of causes was sufficient to produce the result, medical experts must judge. Nietzsche himself once remarked, "We all die too young from a thousand mistakes and ignorances as to how to act." 6

PERSONAL TRAITS 7

in

By nature he was of vigorous constitution. He had been fond as a boy of swimming and skating, and at the University, until his disablement, was an active horseback rider. At Bonn he appeared a "picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly the same height as Goethe. " g He had strong musical tastes and some musical ability. A tender conscience seems to have belonged to him from his earliest years. When a mere child, a missionary visited his father's parish and at a meeting plead movingly for his cause ; the little Fritz responded with an offering of his tin soldiers — and afterwards, walking home with his sister, he murmured, "Perhaps I ought to have given my cavalry!" He was clean both in person and in thought. At school the boys called him "the little parson," instinctively repressing coarse language in his presence. He had a taste of dissipation at the University, but soon sickened of it. The delights of drinking and duelling palled on him, and openly expressed dissatisfaction with the "beer-materialism" of his fellow-students, and strained relations ensuing, appear to have had something to do with his leaving Bonn for Leipzig. Once he allowed himself to be taken to a house of questionable character, but became speechless before what he saw there. For a moment he turned to the piano — and then left. h Professor Deussen, who knew him from Schulpforta days on, says of him, "mulierem nunquam attigit" ; and though this may be too absolute a claim, 1 it shows the impression he left on one of his most intimate friends.

He was never married. 5 He had, however, intimate relations with gifted women, like Frau Cosima Wagner and Malwida von Meysenbug, and his family affections were strong and tender; so unwilling was he to give his mother needless pain that he strove to keep his later writings from her. He had at bottom a sympathetic nature. If he warned against pity, it was not from any instinctive lack of it. In personal intercourse he showed marked politeness and, some say, an almost feminine mildness. All his life he was practically a poor man, his yearly income never exceeding a thousand dollars. He called it his happiness that he owned no house, saying, "Who possesses is possessed ; ' ' liked to wait on himself; despised the dinners of the rich; loved solitude, aside from a few friends — and the common people. Some of the latter class, in the later days of his illness and comparative emaciation in Genoa, spoke endearingly of him as "il santo" or "il piccolo santo." He had remarkable strength of will. Once, when the story of Mutius Scaevola was being discussed among his schoolmates, he lighted a number of matches on his hand and held out his arm without wincing, to prove that one could be superior to pain. After reading Schopenhauer, he practised bodily penance for a short time. Later on he asserted himself against the illnesses that befell him in extraordinary fashion, and when he became mentally and spiritually disillusioned, he was able to wrest strength from his very deprivations. In general, there was an unusual firmness in his moral texture. He despised meanness, untruthfulness, cowardice; he liked straight speaking and straight thinking. He did not have one philosophy for the closet and another for life, as Schopenhauer more or less had, but his thoughts were motives, rules of conduct. In his thinking itself we seem to catch the pulse-beats of his virile will. Professor Riehl calls him " perhaps the most masculine character among our philosophers." 7 He was not without a certain nobleness, too. He once said, "a sufferer has no right to pessimism," i.e., to build a general view on a personal experience. Nor was he dogmatic, overbearing — in spirit at least; I shall speak of this point later. He owned that he contradicted himself more or less. "This thinker [he evidently alludes to himself] needs no one to confute him; he suffices to that end himself. ' ' 8 Nor did he wish to be kept from following his own path by friendly defense or adulation. "The man of knowledge," he said, "must be able not only to love his enemies, but to hate his friends." 9 In short, there was a kind of unworldliness about him, not in the ordinary, but in a lofty sense. I discover few traces of vanity in him (at least before the last year or two of his life), though not a little pride ; he cared little for reputation, save among a few; and he was not ungenerous,

7 Alois Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche, der Kiinstler und der Denker (4th ed.), p- 161.

8 Mixed Opinions and Sayings, § 193.

6 Thus spake Zarathustra, I, xxii, § 3.

PERSONAL TRAITS 9

saying toward the close of his life that he had difficulty in citing one case of literary ill-will, though he had been overwhelmed by ignorance. 10 I do not mean that his language is not severe at times, unwarrantably so; but he tells us almost pathetically in one place that we must not underscore these passages and that the severity and presumption come partly from his isolation. A lonely thinker, who finds no sympathy or echo for his ideas, involuntarily, he says, raises his pitch, and falls easily into irritated speech. k

Perhaps I should add that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing has partly a physical explanation. 1 He was able to write only at intervals, and would put down his thoughts at auspicious moments, oftenest when he was out walking or climbing ; one year he had, he tells us, two hundred sick days. m Such ill fortune was extreme — afterward he fared better — but he was more or less incapacitated every year. He undoubtedly made a virtue of necessity and brought his aphoristic style of writing to a high degree of perfection — sometimes he almost seems to make it his ideal; it is noticeable, however, that in Genealogy of Morals, in The Antichristian, and in Ecce Homo he writes almost as connectedly as in his first treatises, and he appears to have projected Will to Power as a systematic work. The aphorisms are often extremely pregnant, Professor Richter remarking that Nietzsche can in this way give more to the reader in minutes than systematic writers in hours. 11

10 Ecco Homo, IV, § 1.

11 Raoul Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche, sein Leoen und sein Werk (2d ed. ), p. 185.

Chapter II

Nietzsche's life was practically one of thought. Of outer events, " experiences' ' in the ordinary sense, there were few: "we have not our heart there," he confesses, "and not even our ear. ' ' * But to the great problems of life he stood in a very personal relation. He philosophized not primarily for others' sake, but for his own, from a sense of intimate need. Body and mind co-operated. ' ' I have written all my books with my whole body and life; I do not know what purely spiritual problems are." "May I say it? all truths are for me bloody truths — let one look at my previous writings. " " These things you know as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, but the echo of the experiences of others: as when your room shakes from a wagon passing by. But I sit in the wagon, and often I am the wagon itself. ' ' 2 These were private memoranda that have been published since his death, but an attentive reader of books he published often has the sense of their truth borne in upon him. As he puts it objectively in Joyful Science, it makes all the difference in the world whether a thinker is personally related to his problems, so that his fate is bound up in them, or is "impersonal," touching them only with the feelers of cool, curious thought. 3 So earnest is he, so much does this make a sort of medium through which he sees the world, that he once set down Don Quixote as a harmful book, thinking that the parodying of the novels of chivalry which one finds there becomes in effect irony against higher strivings in general — Cervantes, he says, who might have fought the Inquisition, chose rather to make its victims, heretics and idealists of all sorts, laughable, and belongs so far to the decadence of Spanish culture. 4 Some

1 Preface, § 1, to Genealogy of Morals.

have even been led to question whether Nietzsche was capable of humor. a But there is no need to go to this length. Not only does he give a high place to laughter in his books, not only are there special instances of humorous description to be found there, but colleagues of his at Basel, like Burckhardt and Overbeck, testify to his infectious laughter at their frequent meeting place (" Baumannshohle") , Nietzsche himself owning that he had much to make up for, since he had laughed so little as child and boy. 5 For all this the undercurrent of his life was unquestionably serious, and he cannot be placed among writers who give us much surface cheer. Occasionally he indulges in pleasantries to the very end of relief from graver work — such, for instance, as those which make a part of "The Case of Wagner" (see the preface to this pamphlet, where it is also said that the subject itself is not one to make light about), and those in Twilight of the Idols. In the preface to the latter he remarks that when one has a great task like that of a "turning round (Umwert Jiang) of all values," one must shake off at times the all too heavy weight of seriousness it brings.