The life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Halevy
is to remember that he often took too much chloral. It may be that to the circles in these countries to whom the cult of Nietzscheanism appeals, this strain of his thought also appeals. This particular music is not played on many trumpets, but every Superman ought to know it. And he ought to know further that Zarathustra, being brave, gibes not only at St. Paul, but even at Herbert Spencer, and has no more toleration for the gospel according to Marx than for that according to Matthew.
What is the gospel of this ambiguous prophet? It is, he himself declares, a long "Memento vivere." His own experience taught him that the characteristic of life, in its highest moments, is to be unimaginably alive. From a mere process it becomes a sudden intoxication, and on the psychology of that intoxication, which is the psychology of the artist and also that of the lover and the saint, he has written pages which are a wonder of pure light. From this standpoint he criticises justly the mechanical theory of adjustments in which there is nothing to adjust, of adaptations in which there is nothing to adapt, the whole ab extra interpretation of life popularised by Darwin, Spencer, and the English school in general. The living unit is more than a mere node or knot in a tangle of natural selection; it is a fountain of force, of spontaneity, constantly overflowing. "The general aspect of life is not indigence and famine, but on the contrary richness, opulence, even an absurd prodigality." To live is for Nietzsche, as for the Scholastics, to be a centre of self-movement. With the Pragmatists he asserts the primacy of life over thought. But this tension of consciousness, this Dionysiac drunkenness, is only a foundation, it is not yet a philosophy. Philosophy, or at all events moral philosophy, begins with the discovery that there are other people in the world. Your ego, thus drunken and expansive, collides sharply with another ego, equally drunken and expansive, and it becomes at once necessary to frame a code of relations, a rule of the road. Is this force and spontaneity of the individual to flow out towards others through the channel of domination or through that of love?
Zarathustra had marched with the Germans over prostrate France, he had said in his Gargantuan egoism: "If there were Gods, how could I bear not to be a God? Consequently there are no Gods." If the Goths and the Vandals had read Hegelian metaphysics, observes Fouillée, they would have answered this question as Nietzsche answered it. The living unit accumulates a superabundance of force in order to impose its power on others … an andern Macht auslassen. The Will to Power is the sole source of human activity. The strong must live as warriors and conquerors, adopting as their three cardinal virtues pride, pleasure, and the love of domination. Pity is the deepest of corruptions; it but doubles pain, adding to the pain of him who suffers the pain of him who pities. If you have helped any one, you must wash the hands that helped him, for they are unclean. The Crusaders brought home but one treasure, the formula, namely, of the Assassins, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Science is mere illusionism; but the warrior, knowing how to be hard—for that is the new law—will impose his own arbitrary values on all things, and will make life so good that he will desire it to be indefinitely repeated. The earth, thus disciplined, will bring forth the Superman, who, having danced out his day, will disappear to be recreated by the Eternal Return. Thus spake Zarathustra.
The greatest difficulty that one experiences before such a doctrine as this is the difficulty of taking it seriously. Nietzsche, who had a tendency to believe that every reminiscence was an inspiration, is by no means as original as he thought. After all, there were sceptics, optimists, tyrants and poets before Zarathustra. The "common herd" may not be given to discussing ethical dualism, but it knows that since society began there have been two laws, one for the rich and another for the poor. Scepticism as to the objectivity of human values, moral and intellectual, is no new heresy, but a tradition as old as science, and almost as old as faith. The notion of an Eternal Return, crystallised by Plato from a mist of earlier speculation, had exercised many modern thinkers; one has only to name Heine, Blanqui, von Naegeli, Guyau, Dostoievsky. The Romantics had, at the beginning of Nietzsche's century, as Schlegel wrote, "transcended all the ends of life," and, fascinated with the idea of mere power, had filled the imagination of Europe with seas and storms that raged for the sole sake of raging. There was no Scholastic compiler of a text-book on Ethics but had "posed morality as a problem," and asked in his first quæstio whether there was a science of good and evil. The Superman so passionately announced by Nietzsche had already been created by the enigmatic and dilettante fancy of Renan. The name itself was as old as Goethe, though it is to be recalled that not Goethe but Mephistopheles applies it to Faust as a sneer and a temptation. Zarathustra is not a prophet nor even a pioneer; he brings but a new mode of speech, his triumphant and dancing phrase sweeps into its whirl a thousand ghosts and phantoms. And what is to be said of the doctrine itself? Perhaps the most adequate answer to Nietzsche, on the plane of his own ideas, is that of Guyau. Both were poets, strayed into philosophy, both seize upon life as the key to all reality. But Guyau finds in the spontaneous outflow of individual life, itself the spring of sociability, fraternity, love. An organism is more perfect as it is more sociable, there can be no full intensity without wide expansion. "There is a certain generosity inseparable from existence, without which one withers up interiorly and dies. The mind must flower; morality, altruism are the flower of human life." The reduction of all consciousness to one mode—in Nietzsche the Will to Power—is neither new nor difficult. La Rochefoucauld tracked down behind all motives the motive of self-interest, and modern simplifiers have amused themselves by analysing passion into unconscious thought. The soul, as St. Augustine tells us, is all in every part; and since the same self is always present, it is obviously possible in some fashion or another to translate any one mood of its life into any other. But such suppression of the finer details, while interesting as a tour de force, is not scientific psychology. The Will to Power is not sufficiently definite to serve the turn of a moralist or even an immoralist. Power is of many kinds. Love hath its victories not less renowned than hate. Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, history would, says Pascal, have been different, and in the phrase of the French chanson there are often more conquests ambushed in the hair of Delilah than in that of Samson. Nietzsche himself perceived that it was necessary to establish a hierarchy of values as between different manifestations of "power," but this Umwerthung aller Werthe was never either achieved or achievable. The evangel of Zarathustra dissolves into mere sound and fury for lack of what the Court of Equity calls reasonable particularity. Most notable is this in regard to the two laws. Am I a Superman—or rather a potential ancestor of the Superman, for in this case hereditary privilege runs backwards—with the right to found my life on pride, pleasure, and the love of power, or am I a slave with no right except to remain a slave? The test is astral, and even nebulous. If you can compel the stars to circle about you as their centre, if you have a chaos in you and are about to beget a dancing star, then you are of the seed of the Superman. Unhappily, the only people who could seriously entertain such an estimate of themselves are the very wealthy and the very mad. Zarathustra derides the mob in order to flatter the snob; he is malgré lui the casuist of the idle rich, the courtier of international finance.
Friedrich Nietzsche was an optimist. It was a paradox of courage. There is nothing nobler or more valiant in the history of thought than his refusal to let the sun be dimmed by the mist of his own suffering. "No invalid has the right to be a pessimist." "Let them beware: the years in which my vitality sank to its minimum were those in which I ceased to be a pessimist." That is magnificent, but it is not philosophy. If Nietzsche by his insomnia and his wounded eyes is pledged on the point of honour to optimism, is not Schopenhauer by his fixed income and excellent digestion similarly pledged to pessimism? But Zarathustra's optimism is not merely positive, it is ecstatic: to express its fulness he creates the formula of the Eternal Return. He claps his hands and cries "Encore!" to life. He is drunken with joy as men are in the taverns with corn and the grape, and he shouts "The same again!"
This Eternal Return is presented to us as a conclusion of mathematical physics and spectrum analysis. St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following Aristotle, that the stars were composed of a substance nobler than that of earth, not subject to birth or death, and so immune from corruption. But Fraunhofer and his successors have, with their prisms and telescopes, discovered in the stars the same eighty-one or eighty-two elements which constitute the earth. Since then we have but a finite number of indestructible elements and forces, and an infinite space and time—or at least a space and time to which we can conceive no limits—it must follow that the same combinations will repeat themselves incessantly both