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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter IX Section 9 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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IX. Criticism

It is a beautiful poem; and perhaps it is a poem rather than a philosophy. We know that there are absurdities here, and that the man went too far in an attempt to convince and correct himself; but we can see him suffering at every line, and we must love him even where we question him. There is a time when we tire of sentimentality and delusion, and relish the sting of doubt and denial; and then Nietzsche comes to us as a tonic, like open spaces and fresh winds after a long ceremony in a crowded church. “He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it; otherwise the chances are that it will kill him.” Let none mistake this acid for infant’s milk.

There is a time when we tire of sentimentality and delusion, and relish the sting of doubt and denial; and then Nietzsche comes to us as a tonic, like open spaces and fresh winds after a long ceremony in a crowded church.

And then what style! “People will say, some day, that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German could do an incalculable distance behind us.” And it is almost so.* ”My style dances,” he says; every sentence is a lance; the language is supple, vigorous, nervous,—the style of a fencer, too quick and brilliant for the normal eye. But on rereading him we perceive that something of this brilliance is due to exaggeration, to an interesting but at last neurotic egotism, to an over-facile inversion of every accepted notion, the ridicule of every virtue, the praise of every vice; he takes, we discover, a sophomore’s delight in shocking; we conclude that it is easy to be interesting when one has no prejudices in favor of morality. These dogmatic assertions, these unmodified generalizations, these prophetic repetitions, these contradictions—of others not more than of himself—reveal a mind that has lost its balance, and hovers on the edge of madness. At last this brilliance tires us out and exhausts our nerves, like whips upon the flesh, or loud emphasis in conversation. There is a sort of Teutonic bluster in this violence of speech; none of that restraint which is the first principle of art; none of that balance, harmony, and controversial urbanity, which Nietzsche so admired in the French. Nevertheless is it a powerful style; we are overwhelmed with the passion and iteration of it; Nietzsche does not prove, he announces and reveals; he wins us with his imagination rather than with his logic; he offers us not a philosophy merely, nor yet only a poem, but a new faith, a new hope, a new religion.

* Nietzsche thought himself a Pole.

Something of Nietzsche’s brilliance is due to exaggeration. These dogmatic assertions reveal a mind that has lost its balance, and hovers on the edge of madness. Nevertheless it is a powerful style. Nietzsche offers us a new faith, a new hope, a new religion.

His thought, as much as his style, reveals him as a son of the Romantic movement. ”What,” he asks, “does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become ‘timeless.'” But this was a counsel of perfection which he more honored in the breach than in the observance; he was baptized with the spirit of his age, and by total immersion. He did not realize how Kant’s subjectivism—“the world is my idea,” as Schopenhauer honestly put it—had led to Fichte’s “absolute ego,” and this to Stirner’s unbalanced individualism, and this to the unmoralism of the superman. The superman is not merely Schopenhauer’s “genius,” and Carlyle’s “hero,” and Wagner’s Siegfried; he looks suspiciously like Schiller’s Karl Moor and Goethe’s Gotz; Nietzsche took more than the word Uebermensch (superior humans) from the young Goethe whose later Olympian calm he scorned so enviously. His letters are full of romantic sentiment and tenderness; “I suffer” recurs in them almost as frequently as “I die” in Heine. He calls himself “a mystic and almost maenadic ‘soul,” and speaks of The Birth of Tragedy as “the confession of a romanticist.” “I am afraid,” he writes to Brandes, “that I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist.” “An author must becomesilent when his work begins to speak”; but Nietzsche never conceals himself, and rushes into the first person on every page. His exaltation of instinct against thought, of the individual against society, of the “Dionysian” against the “Apollonian” (i. e., the romantic against the classic type), betrays his time as definitely as the dates of his birth and his death. He was, for the philosophy of his age, what Wagner was for its music,—the culmination of the Romantic movement, the high tide of the Romantic stream; he liberated and exalted the “will” and the “genius” of Schopenhauer from all social restraint, as Wagner liberated and exalted the passion that had torn at its classic bonds in the Sonata Pathetique and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. He was the last great scion of the lineage of Rousseau.

Nietzsche’s thought, as much as his style, reveals him as a son of the Romantic movement. His exaltation of instinct against thought, of the individual against society, of the “Dionysian” against the “Apollonian”, betrays his time as definitely as the dates of his birth and his death. He was the last great scion of the lineage of Rousseau.

Let us go back now on the road we have traveled with Nietzsche, and tell him, however ineffectually, some of the objections with which we were so often tempted to interrupt him. He was wise enough to see for himself, in his later years, how much absurdity had contributed to the originality of The Birth of Tragedy. Scholars like Wilamowitz-Moellendorff laughed the book out of the philologic court. The attempt to deduce Wagner from Aeschylus was the self-immolation of a young devotee before a despotic god. Who would have thought that the Reformation was “Dionysian”—i. e., wild, unmoral, vinous, Bacchanalian; and that the Renaissance was quite the opposite of these, quiet, restrained, moderate, “Apollonian”? Who would have suspected that “Socratism was the culture of the opera”? The attack on Socrates was the disdain of a Wagnerian for logical thought; the admiration for Dionysus was a sedentary man’s idolatry of action (hence also the apotheosis of Napoleon), and a bashful bachelor’s secret envy of masculine bibulousness and sexuality. 

Nietzsche was wise enough to see for himself, in his later years, how much absurdity had contributed to the originality of The Birth of Tragedy. Who would have thought that the Reformation was “Dionysian” and that the Renaissance was quite the opposite of these, quiet, restrained, moderate, “Apollonian”?

Perhaps Nietzsche was right in considering the pre-Socratic age as the halcyon days of Greece; no doubt the Peloponnesian War undermined the economic and political basis of Periclean culture. But it was a little absurd to see in Socrates only a disintegrating criticism (as if Nietzsche’s own function was not chiefly this) and not also a work of salvage for a society ruined less by philosophy than by war and corruption and immorality. Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato. Nietzsche denounces Plato, as he denounces all his creditors—no man is a hero to his debtor ; but what is Nietzsche’s philosophy but the ethics of Thrasymachus and Callicles, and the politics of Plato’s Socrates?—With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge (as taught by the Delphic inscriptions and the greater philosophers) must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire; that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Some have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture,” he writes, but alas, how can one give what one has not?

Nietzsche was not even a pagan for he lacked the balance and restraint that made men like Pericles and Goethe strong.

Of all Nietzsche’s books, Zarathustra is safest from criticism, partly because it is obscure, and partly because its inexpugnable merits dwarf all fault-finding. The idea of eternal recurrence, though common to the “Apollonian” Spencer as well as to the “Dionysian” Nietzsche, strikes one as unhealthy fancy, a weird last-minute effort to recover the belief in immortality. Every critic has seen the contradiction between the bold preachment of egoism (Zarathustra “proclaims the Ego whole and holy, and selfishness blessed”—an unmistakable echo of Stirner) and the appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice in the preparation and service of the superman. But who, reading this philosophy, will classify himself all servant, and not as superman?

Of all Nietzsche’s books, Zarathustra is safest from criticism, partly because it is obscure, and partly because its inexpugnable merits dwarf all fault-finding.

As for the ethical system of Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, it is stimulating exaggeration. We acknowledge the need of asking men to be braver, and harder on themselves,—almost all ethical philosophies have asked that; but there is no urgent necessity for asking people to be crueler and “more evil”—surely this is a work of supererogation? And there is no great call to complain that morality is a weapon used by the weak to limit the strong; the strong are not too deeply impressed by it, and make rather clever use of it in turn: most moral codes are imposed from above rather than from below; and the crowd praises and blames by prestige imitation. It is well, too, that humility should be occasionally maltreated; “we have had deprecation and ducking long enough,” as the good gray poet said; but one does not observe any superabundance of this quality in modern character. Nietzsche here fell short of that historical sense which he lauded as so necessary to philosophy; or he would have seen the doctrine of meekness and humbleness of heart as a necessary antidote to the violent and warlike virtues of the barbarians who nearly destroyed, in the first millennium of the Christian era, that very culture to which Nietzsche always returns for nourishment and refuge. Surely this wild emphasis on power and movement is the echo of a feverish and chaotic age? This supposedly universal “will to power” hardly expresses the quiescence of the Hindu, the calm of the Chinese, or the satisfied routine of the medieval peasant. Power is the idol of some of us; but most of us long rather for security and peace.

Nietzsche here fell short of that historical sense which he lauded as so necessary to philosophy. Surely this wild emphasis on power and movement is the echo of a feverish and chaotic age? Power is the idol of some of us; but most of us long rather for security and peace.

In general, as every reader will have perceived, Nietzsche fails to recognize the place and value of the social instincts; he thinks the egoistic and individualistic impulses need reinforcement by philosophy! One must wonder where were Nietzsche’s eyes when all Europe was forgetting, in a slough of selfish wars, those cultural habits and acquisitions which he admired so much, and which depend so precariously on cooperation and social amenity and self-restraint. The essential function of Christianity has been to moderate, by the inculcation of an extreme ideal of gentleness, the natural barbarity of men; and any thinker who fears that men have been corrupted out of egoism into an excess of Christian virtue needs only to look about him to be comforted and reassured.

Nietzsche fails to recognize the place and value of the social instincts; he thinks the egoistic and individualistic impulses need reinforcement by philosophy!

Made solitary by illness and nervousness, and forced into war against the sluggishness and mediocrity of men, Nietzsche was led to suppose that all the great virtues are the virtues of men who stand alone. He reacted from Schopenhauer’s submergence of the individual in the species to an unbalanced liberation of the individual from social control. Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: “He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached” a riper age; “noble enough to revoke he was!” But death had other plans.

Nietzsche was led to suppose that all the great virtues are the virtues of men who stand alone. He never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. 

Perhaps in politics his vision is sounder than in morals. Aristocracy is the ideal government; who shall deny it? “O ye kind heavens! there is in every nation … a fittest, a wisest, bravest, best; whom could we find and make king over us, all were in truth well …. By what art discover him? Will the heavens in their pity teach us no art? For our need of him is great!” But who are the best? Do the best appear only in certain families, and must we therefore have hereditary aristocracy? But we had it; and it led to clique-pursuits, class-irresponsibility, and stagnation. Perhaps aristocracies have been saved, as often as destroyed, by intermarriage with the middle classes; how else has the English aristocracy maintained itself? And perhaps inbreeding degenerates? Obviously there are many sides to these complex problems, at which Nietzsche has flung so lustily his Yeas and Nays.* Hereditary aristocracies do not like world-unification; they tend to a narrowly nationalistic policy, however cosmopolitan they may be in conduct; if they abandoned nationalism they would lose a main source of their power the manipulation of foreign relations. And perhaps a world-state would not be so beneficial to culture as Nietzsche thinks; large masses move slowly; and Germany probably did more for culture when she was merely “a geographical expression,” with independent courts rivaling one another in the patronage of art, than in her days of unity and empire and expansion; it was not an emperor who cherished Goethe and rescued Wagner.

* “In my youth,” says Nietzsche somewhere, “I flung at the world with Yea and Nay; now in my oId age I do penance for it.”

Perhaps in politics his vision is sounder than in morals. Aristocracy is the ideal government; who shall deny it? But who are the best? Do the best appear only in certain families, and must we therefore have hereditary aristocracy?

It is a common delusion that the great periods of culture have been ages of hereditary aristocracy: on the contrary, the efflorescent periods of Pericles and the Medici and Elizabeth and the Romantic age were nourished with the wealth of a rising bourgeoisie; and the creative work in literature and art was done not by aristocratic families but by the offspring of the middle class;—by such men as Socrates, who was the son of a midwife, and Voltaire, who was the son of an attorney, and Shakespeare, who was the son of a butcher. It is ages of movement and change that stimulate cultural creation; ages in which a new and vigorous class is rising to power and pride. And so in politics: it would be suicidal to exclude from statesmanship such genius as lacked aristocratic pedigree; the better formula, surely, is a “career open to talent” wherever born; and genius has a way of getting born in the most outlandish places. Let us be ruled by all the best. An aristocracy is good only if it is a fluent body of men whose patent to power lies not in birth but in ability,—an aristocracy continually selected and nourished out of a democracy of open and equal opportunity to all.

An aristocracy is good only if it is a fluent body of men whose patent to power lies not in birth but in ability,—an aristocracy continually selected and nourished out of a democracy of open and equal opportunity to all.

After these deductions (if they must be made), what remains? Enough to make the critic uncomfortable. Nietzsche has been refuted by every aspirant to respectability; and yet he stands as a milestone in modern thought, and a mountain-peak in German prose. No doubt he was guilty of a little exaggeration when he predicted that the future would divide the past into “Before Nietzsche” and “After Nietzsche”; but he did succeed in effecting a wholesome critical review of institutions and opinions that for centuries had been taken for granted. It remains that he opened a new vista into Greek drama and philosophy; that he showed at the outset the seeds of romantic decadence in the music of Wagner; that he analyzed our human nature with a subtlety as sharp as a surgeon’s knife, and perhaps as salutary ; that he laid bare some hidden roots of morality as no other modern thinker had done;* that “he introduced a value hitherto practically unknown in the realms of ethics—namely, aristocracy”; that he compelled an honest taking of thought about the ethical implications of Darwinism; that he wrote the greatest prose poem in the literature of his century; and (this above all) that he conceived of man as something that man must surpass. He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the modern mind like cleansing lightning and a rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.**

* Though of course the essentials of Nietzsche’s ethic are to be found in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and even in the Vautrln of Balzac’s Pere Goriot.

** The extensive influence of Nietzsche on contemporary literature will need no pointing out to those who are familiar with the writings of Artzibashef, Strindberg. Przybyszewski, Hauptmann, Dehmel, Hamsun, and d’ Annunzlo.

Nietzsche has been refuted by every aspirant to respectability; and yet he stands as a milestone in modern thought, and a mountain-peak in German prose. No doubt he was guilty of a little exaggeration, but the air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote.

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter IX Section 7 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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VII. Decadence

Consequently, the road to the superman must lie through aristocracy. Democracy—“this mania for counting noses”—must be eradicated before it is too late. The first step here is the destruction of Christianity so far as all higher men are concerned. The triumph of Christ was the beginning of democracy; “the first Christian was in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lived and struggled unremittingly for ‘equal rights'”; in modern times he would have been sent to Siberia. “He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant”—this is the inversion of all political wisdom, of all sanity; indeed, as one reads the Gospel one feels the atmosphere of a Russian novel; they are a sort of plagiarism from Dostoevsky. Only among the lowly could such notions take root; and only in an age whose rulers had degenerated and ceased to rule. “When Nero and Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest man was worth more than the man on top.”

According to Nietzsche, aristocracy must be supported and democracy eradicated. The first step should be the destruction of Christianity that has spawned democracy in the first place.

As the conquest of Europe by Christianity was the end of ancient aristocracy, so the overrunning of Europe by Teutonic warrior barons brought a renewal of the old masculine virtues, and planted the roots of the modern aristocracies. These men were not burdened with “morals”: they “were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and compromise as if nothing but a student’s freak had been perpetrated.” It was such men who supplied the ruling classes for Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, Italy, and Russia.

A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization, with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, … this herd founded the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin with a contract. What has he to do with contracts who can command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene with violence in deed and demeanour?

The aristocracy was established by the Teutonic race of conquerers and masters, who were not burdened with morals. They had masculine virtues and were free of social restraints.

This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock. Just as Catholicism was mellowing into the aristocratic and unmoral culture of the Renaissance, the Reformation crushed it with a revival of Judaic rigor and solemnity. “Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph … I see before me a possibility perfectly magical in its charm and glorious coloring. … Caesar Borgia as Pope. … Do you understand me?”

This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock.

Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit; add, now, Wagnerian opera. As a result, “the present-day Prussian is one of the most dangerous enemies of culture.” “The presence of a German retards my digestion.” “If, as Gibbon says, nothing but time—though a long time—is required for a world to perish; so nothing but time—though still more time—is required for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany.” When Germany defeated Napoleon it was as disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church; thenceforward Germany put away her Goethes, her Schopenhauers and her Beethovens, and began to worship “patriots”; “Deutschland uber Alles (Germany above everything)—I fear that was the end of German philosophy.” Yet there is a natural seriousness and depth in the Germans that gives ground for the hope that they may yet redeem Europe; they have more of the masculine virtues than the French or the English; they have perseverance, patience, industry—hence their scholarship, their science, and their military discipline; it is delightful to see how all Europe is worried about the German army. If the German power of organization could cooperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics. “We require an intergrowth of the German and Slav races; and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, that we may become the masters of the world. … We require an unconditional union with Russia.” The alternative was encirclement and strangulation.

There is a natural seriousness and depth in the Germans that gives ground for the hope that they may yet redeem Europe. If the German power of organization could cooperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics.

The trouble with Germany is a certain stolidity of mind which pays for this solidity of character; Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. “I believe only in French culture, and I regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a misunderstanding.” “When one reads Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, … Vauvenargues, and Chamfort, one is nearer to antiquity than with any group of authors in any other nation.” Voltaire is “a grand seigneur of the mind”; and Taine is “the first of living historians.” Even the later French writers Flaubert, Bourget, Anatole France, etc.—are infinitely beyond other Europeans in clarity of thought and language—“what clearness and delicate precision in these Frenchmen!” European nobility of taste, feeling and manners is the work of France. But of the old France, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Revolution, by destroying the aristocracy, destroyed the vehicle and nursery of culture, and now the French soul is thin and pale in comparison with what it used to be. Nevertheless it has still some, fine qualities; “in France almost all psychological and artistic questions are considered with incomparably more subtlety and thoroughness than they are in Germany. … At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance in the world of culture.”

Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance in the world of culture.

Russia is the blond beast of Europe. Its people have a “stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives them even nowadays the advantage over us Westerners.” Russia has a strong government, without “parliamentary imbecility.” Force of will has long been accumulating there, and now threatens to find release; it would not be surprising to find Russia becoming master of Europe. “A thinker who has at heart the future of Europe will in all his perspectives concerning the future calculate upon the Jews and the Russians as above all the surest and the likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces.” But all in all it is the Italians who are the finest and most vigorous of existing peoples; the man-plant grows strongest in Italy, as Alfieri boasted. There is a manly bearing, an aristocratic pride in even the lowliest Italian; “a poor Venetian gondolier is always a better figure than a Berlin Geheimrath (Berlin Privy Councillor), and in the end, indeed, a better man.”

Force of will has long been accumulating in Russia, and now threatens to find release. The Italians are the finest and most vigorous of existing peoples in Europe.

Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; “shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together.” English utilitarianism and philistinism are the nadir of European culture. Only in a land of cut-throat competition could anyone conceive of life as a struggle for mere existence. Only in a land where shop-keepers and ship-keepers had multiplied to such a number as to overcome the aristocracy could democracy be fabricated; this is the gift, the Greek gift, which England has given the modern world. Who will rescue Europe from England, and England from democracy?

Worst of all are the English. They have corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion. English utilitarianism and philistinism are the nadir of European culture. 

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Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter IX Section 5 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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V. Hero-morality

Zarathustra became for Nietzsche a Gospel whereon his later books were merely commentaries. If Europe would not appreciate his poetry perhaps it would understand his prose. After the song of the prophet, the logic of the philosopher; what though the philosopher himself should disbelieve in logic?—it is a tool of clarity, if not the seal of proof. 

Following Zarathustra, Nietzsche simply used prose and logic to clarify his philosophy expressed earlier in that poem. 

He was more than ever alone now, for Zarathustra had seemed a little queer even to Nietzsche’s friends. Scholars like Overbeck and Burckhardt, who had been his colleagues at Basle, and had admired The Birth of Tragedy, mourned the loss of a brilliant philologist, and could not celebrate the birth of a poet. His sister (who had almost justified his view that for a philosopher a sister is an admirable substitute for a wife) left him suddenly, to marry one of those anti-Semites whom Nietzsche despised, and went off to Paraguay to found a communistic colony. She asked her pale, frail brother to come along, for the sake of his health; but Nietzsche valued the life of the mind more than the health of the body; he wished to stay where the battle was; Europe was necessary to him “as a culture museum.” He lived irregularly in place and time; he tried Switzerland and Venice and Genoa and Nice and Turin. He liked to write amid the doves that flock about the lions of St. Mark—“this Piazza San Marco is my finest work-room;” But he had to follow Hamlet’s advice about staying out of the sun, which hurt his ailing eyes; he shut himself up in dingy, heatless attics, and worked behind closed blinds. Because of his failing eyes he wrote henceforth no books, but only aphorisms.

Nietzsche was more than ever alone now as his friends and sister went away. He lived irregularly in place and time and gradually his eye start failing. He shut himself up in dingy, heatless attics, and worked behind closed blinds. 

He gathered some of these fragments together, under the titles Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887); he hoped, in these volumes, to destroy the old morality, and prepare the way for the morality of the superman. For a moment he became the philologist again, and sought to enforce his new ethic with etymologies that are, not quite beyond reproach. He observes that the German language contains two words for bad: schlecht and bose. Schlecht was applied by the upper to the lower classes, and meant ordinary, common; later it came to mean vulgar, worthless, bad. Bose was applied by the lower to the upper classes, and meant unfamiliar, irregular, incalculable, dangerous, harmful, cruel; Napoleon was bose. Many simple peoples feared the exceptional individual as a disintegrating force; there is a Chinese proverb that “the great man is a public misfortune.” Likewise, gut had two meanings, as opposite to schlecht and bose: as used by the aristocracy it meant strong, brave, powerful, warlike, godlike (gut from Gott); as used by the people it meant familiar, peaceful, harmless, kind.

Nietzsche looked for a way beyond good and evil. He hoped to destroy the old morality, and prepare the way for the morality of the superman. 

Here then were two contradictory valuations of human behavior, two ethical standpoints and criteria: a Herren-moral and a Heerden-moral—a morality of masters and a morality of the herd. The former was the accepted standard in classical antiquity, especially among the Romans; even for the ordinary Roman, virtue was virtus—manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. But from Asia, and especially from the Jews in the days of their political subjection, came the other standard; subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism—which is an appeal for help. Under this herd-morality love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace; strength was replaced by cunning, open[ness] by secret revenge, sternness by pity, initiative by imitation, the pride of honor by the whip of conscience. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic. It was the eloquence of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus, that made the view of a subject class an almost universal ethic; the “world” and the “flesh” became synonyms of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue.

Here then were two contradictory valuations of human behavior—a morality of masters and a morality of the herd. Under this herd-morality, love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace. This almost became the universal ethic. The “world” and the “flesh” became synonyms of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue.

This valuation was brought to a peak by Jesus: with him every man was of equal worth, and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism; progress was now defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of progressive equalization and vulgarization, in terms of decadence and descending life. The final stage in this decay is the exaltation of pity and self-sacrifice, the sentimental comforting of criminals, “the inability of a society to excrete.” Sympathy is legitimate if it is active; but pity is a paralyzing mental luxury, a waste of feeling for the irremediably botched, the incompetent, the defective, the vicious, the culpably diseased and the irrevocably criminal. There is a certain indelicacy and intrusiveness in pity; “visiting the sick” is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor’s helplessness.

Progress was now defined in terms of democracy, utilitarianism, socialism, which led to decadence and descending life. There was a waste of feeling for the irremediably botched, the incompetent, the defective, the vicious, the culpably diseased and the irrevocably criminal.

Behind all this “morality” is a secret will to power. Love itself is only a desire for possession; courtship is combat and mating is mastery:  kills Carmen to prevent her from becoming the property of another. “People imagine that they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage of another being, often in opposition to their own. But for so doing they want to possess the other being. … L’amour est de tous les sentiments le plus egoiste, et, par consequent, lorsqu’il est blesse, le moins genereux.” * Even in the love of truth is the desire to possess it, perhaps to be its first possessor, to find it virginal. Humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.

* quoting Benjamin Constant: “Love is of all feelings the most egoistic; and in consequence it is, when crossed, the least generous.” But Nietzsche can speak more gently of love. “Whence arises the sudden passion of a man for a woman? … Least of all from sensuality only: but when a man finds weakness, need of help, and high spirits, all united in the same creature, he suffers a sort of over-flowing of soul, and is touched and offended at the same moment. At this point arises the source of great love” And he quotes from the French “the chastest utterance I ever heard: Dans Ie veritable amour c’est l’ame qui evnveloppe le corps“—“in true love It is the soul that embraces the body.”

Love is not unselfish. Underlying love is a desire to possess the object of love.

Against this passion for power, reason and morality are helpless; they are but weapons in its hands, dupes of its game. “Philosophical systems are shining mirages”; what we see is not the long-sought truth, but the reflection of our own desires. “The philosophers all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic; … whereas in fact a prejudicial proposition, idea or ‘suggestion,’ which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.” 

Against this passion for power, reason and morality are helpless. What we see in philosophy is not the long-sought truth, but the reflection of our own desires.

It is these underground desires, these pulsations of the will to power, that determine our thoughts. “The greater part of our intellectual activity goes on unconsciously, and unfelt by us; … conscious thinking … is the weakest.” Because instinct is the direct operation of the will to power, undisturbed by consciousness, “instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered.” Indeed, the role of consciousness has been senselessly over-estimated; “consciousness may be regarded as secondary, almost as indifferent and superfluous, probably destined to disappear and to be superseded by perfect automatism.”

Instinct is the direct operation of the will to power, undisturbed by consciousness. The role of consciousness has been senselessly over-estimated.

In strong men there is very little attempt to conceal desire under the cover of reason; their simple argument is, “I wilI.” In the uncorrupted vigor of the master soul, desire is its own justification; and conscience, pity or remorse can find no entrance. But so far has the Judaeo-Christian-democratic point-of-view prevailed in modern times, that even the strong are now ashamed of their strength and their health, and begin to seek “reasons.” The aristocratic virtues and valuations are dying out. “Europe is threatened with a new Buddhism”; even Schopenhauer and Wagner become pity-ful Buddhists. “The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.” The strong are no longer permitted to exercise their strength; they must become as far as possible like the weak; “goodness is to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.” Has not Kant, that “great Chinaman of Koenigsberg,” proved that men must never be used as means? Consequently the instIncts of the strong—to hunt, to fight, to conquer and to rule—are introverted into self-laceration for lack of outlet; they beget asceticism and the “bad conscience”; “all instincts which do not find a vent turn inward—this is what I mean by the growing ‘internalization’ of man: here we have the first form of what came to be called the soul.” *

* The student of psychology may be interested to follow up psychoanalytic sources in … (theory of dreams); … (Adler’s theory of the neurotic constitution); and … (“overcorrection”). Those who are interested in pragmatism will find a fairly complete anticipation of it in …

For Nietzsche, the source of strength are the instincts and desires, and the Judaeo-Christian-democratic point-of-view is the aberration. However, he is ignoring that there can be conflicting and self-destructive instincts in a person that can drive him insane.

The formula for decay is that the virtues proper to the herd infect the leaders, and break them into common clay. “Moral systems must be compelled first of all to bow before the gradations of rank; their presumption must be driven home to their conscience—until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral to say that ‘what is right for one is proper for another.'” Different functions require different qualities; and the “evil” virtues of the strong are as necessary in a society as the “good” virtues of the weak. Severity, violence, danger, war, are as valuable as kindliness and peace; great individuals appear only in times of danger and violence and merciless necessity. The best thing in man is strength of will, power and permanence of passion; without passion one is mere milk, incapable of deeds. Greed, envy, even hatred, are indispensable items in the process of struggle, selection and survival. Evil is to good as variation to heredity, as innovation and experiment to custom; there is no development without an almost-criminal violation of precedents and “order.” If evil were not good it would have disappeared. We must beware of being too good; “man must become better and more evil.” 

The leaders need not follow the “morality“ of the herd; instead, they must follow the instincts demanded by their role. The best thing in man is strength of will, power and permanence of passion; without passion one is mere milk, incapable of deeds. 

Nietzsche is consoled to find so much evil and cruelty in the world; he takes a sadistic pleasure in reflecting on the extent to which, he thinks, “cruelty constituted the great joy and delight of ancient man”; and he believes that our pleasure in the tragic drama, or in anything sublime, is a refined and vicarious cruelty. “Man is the cruelest animal,” says Zarathustra. “When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights and crucifixions he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on earth. And when he invented hell … lo, hell was his heaven on earth”; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.

For Nietzsche, instinct is uppermost regardless of it being good or evil. 

The ultimate ethic is biological; we must judge things according to their value for life; we need a physiological “transvaluation of all values.” The real test of a man, or a group, or a species, is energy, capacity, power. We may be partly reconciled to the nineteenth century—otherwise so destructive of all the higher virtues—by its emphasis on the physical. The soul is a function of an organism. One drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may make a man suffer more than Prometheus suffered from the vulture. Varying foods have varying mental effects: rice makes for Buddhism, and German metaphysics is the result of beer. A philosophy therefore is true or false according as it is the expression and exaltation of ascending or of descending life. The decadent says, “Life is worth nothing”; let him rather say; “I am worth nothing.” Why should life be worth living when all the heroic values in it have been permitted to decay, and democracy—that is, disbelief in all great men—ruins, with every decade, another people?

The gregarious European man nowadays assumes an air as if he were the only kind of man that is allowable; he glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy,—by virtue of which he is gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd,—as the peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where it is believed that the leader and bellwether cannot be dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made nowadays to replace commanders by the summoning together of clever gregarious men; all representative constitutions, for example, are of this origin. In spite of all, what a blessing, what a deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable, is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these gregarious Europeans—of this fact the effect of the appearance of Napoleon was the last great proof; the history of the influence of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness to which the entire century has attained in its worthiest individuals and periods.

Napoleon is the ideal for Nietzsche, because the real test of a man, or a group, or a species, is energy, capacity, power. He looks at the ultimate ethic to be biological; the soul as a function of an organism; and varying foods having varying mental effects.

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