Modernities

The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic! Nietzsche was well advised to append the word "polemic" to his title, for it supplies the key to his whole position. To some extent, no doubt, the "Genealogy" may be the expression in more philosophic language of those ideas, which find in Zarathustra their poetic and almost biblical formulation.

Yet philosopher though he may be, Nietzsche is no abstract thinker sitting down stolidly on some icy height to solve the riddle of the universe, whatever it may be, by the rigid rules of abstract logic, so that he may placidly present the solution to such members of the public as happen to be interested in metaphysics. On the contrary his mind, and even more truly his temperament, are made up from the outset. Certain ideas grip him so tensely, and for him, at any rate, constitute so fiery and omnipresent a reality, as to be from his standpoint things transcending the mere cavillings of logicians and scientists.

"You ask me why," says Zarathustra, "but I say unto you I am not one of those whom one may ask their why."

The same idea is more technically expressed in the preface to the Genealogy-"that new immoral, or at least, 'amoral' a priori, and that 'categorical imperative,' which was its voice (but, oh I how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems), to which since then I have given more and more obedience (and, indeed, what is more than obedience)." For, startling though it may seem to the orthodox, albeit acceptable enough to the acolytes of the new faith, the fact stands out irresistibly, that all the later writings of Nietzsche are saturated through and through with the religious spirit.

For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. The content, indeed, of the religion of this converse Christ may be diametrically opposed to that of the original, but the machinery is the same. With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma of self-expression and self-glorification. Turn, in fact, the doctrines of Christianity upside down, but leave constant the missionary enthusiasm of its founder, his chronic fits of extreme depression and extreme exaltation, and you have the quintessence of Nietzsche.

As, however, it is the boast of all religions that they are beyond the realms of exact logic and empirical science, it would be as unfair to look in our prophet's polemic for the mathematical accuracy of a Euclidian proposition, as it would be to search for such accuracy amid the many grandiose and tragic thoughts that loom over the invectives of Isaiah, Jesus, and Jeremiah.

Not, indeed, but what there are many new, swift, and illuminating truths in our philosopher's gospel, just as there were in the pronouncements of his afore-said Hebrew brethren. But the essence, the raison d'être of the whole book is purely polemical. Nietzsche is out to kill, and so long as his weapons effectually subserve that object, he is, and quite logically, indifferent to aught else.

Before, however, we analyse in detail the philosophy of this book, it is advisable to adjust our sights to those particular targets on which Nietzsche trained his gigantic and murderous artillery. We shall also have a better prospect of getting really into touch with "the very inner pulse of the machine," the real core of this philosophy, if we take a necessarily short, but it is to be hoped none the less vivid, glance at those reasons which induced Nietzsche to envisage the objects of his attack with so tense and implacable a hatred.

Now Nietzsche found his intellectual jumping-off ground in that hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism stuck on a pedestal of sex, which constituted the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the essence of the fashionable pessimism of mid-century Germany. To endeavour to condense one of the most brilliant and elaborate systems of the last century into a few words is at best a delicate and hazardous task, yet perhaps we may adumbrate tentatively the radical elements which spurred Nietzsche to so sanguinary a revolt.

Life according to Schopenhauer was a sorry failure, a thing not worth living on its merits, but kept going by the driving impetus of a blind life-force and knit with a mutual pity. Life then being intrinsically evil, the remedy for the evil was to live as little as possible-" Draw your desire back from the world so that there may be an end of that phenomenal life which is nothing but grief." Apart from general asceticism, there were two specific anodynes prescribed by Schopenhauer for the disease called life-art which transcended life, and lifted the spectator or listener on to another plane, and philosophy which, as it were, blunted the sting of life by the contemplation of the essentially unreal nature of the phenomenal universe. But the greatest good was Nirvana, a kind of Pantheistic Absolute of negativity, into which one eventually merged, to enjoy the supreme paradox of a peaceful self-consciousness of one's own nothingness.

It is easy for us to sneer, nowadays, at this bilious and suicidal system, and to explain the whole theory of the Will to Live by the keen and chronic tyranny which the sexual instinct exercised over the philosopher himself; the fact remained, Schopenhauer was the dominant influence of the day-how dominant, can be seen from the fact that the whole of later Wagnerian music is merely a translation of his philosophy into the language of sound. It is easy to see the extent to which Schopenhauer and Wagner were saturated with the whole spirit of primitive and medi?val Christianity. Human life, forsooth, is essentially bad and essentially unreal; salvation only lies in the mortification and annihilation of the self. Apart, however, from philosophical and theological technicalities, the profound psychological import of this nihilistic pessimism and neo-Christian romanticism is patent. Man looks at man's life on earth, and gives it up as a bad job, or at best makes some fantastic effort to create a new world to redress the balance of the old. "They wanted to run away from their misery, and the stars were too far away. Then they sighed, Oh, that there were heavenly ways, forsooth, to slink into another Being and Happiness."

It has, in fact, been well put that, as the motto of Goethe was "Memento vivere," so was the motto of Schopenhauer, "Memento mori."

Now, Nietzsche voiced the revolt of those temperaments whose ears were attuned rather to "Memento vivere" than "Memento mori." We must remember, moreover, that that Christian romanticism which finds its best metaphysical formulation in Schopenhauer was in itself but a reaction from the real spirit of the century, that ebullience and exuberance of the human ego of which Stendhal is perhaps the most typical manifestation. It might well indeed be instructive to trace the intellectual descent of Nietzsche from Stendhal, and, applying again the sociological method, to speculate as to how far he derived some of the impetus for his philosophy of egoism from the aggressive wars of Prussia, as exemplified in the Sadowa campaign and the Franco-German war. It is time, however, that we came to the temperament of the philosopher himself. It is indeed a platitude, that as man makes his gods in his own image, so does the philosopher create his systems. What is Aristotle's ideal of the β?ο? θεωρ?τικο?, and his conception of the self-contemplative god but the erection into a universal norm of the thinker's natural philosophic idiosyncrasy? What is the elaborate "I and Me" of the cosmology of Fichte but the attribution to the universe of the personal idiosyncrasies of Fichte, the self-conscious Doppelg?nger? And how Schopenhauer promoted sex into the devil, whose heat animates this earthly hell, we have already seen. What, then, was the impetus which impelled Nietzsche to batter down the walls of the contemporary moral and philosophic universe? The theory of an innate joie de vivre, a system highly if not over-charged with vitality, supplies but half the answer. The real explanation lies in the stiffening of this natural exuberance beneath the tension of a grim incessant struggle with a nervous malady.

It is not actually necessary to go as far as the Swedish writer, M. Bjerre, who finds in Nietzsche's deliberate and revolutionary transvaluation of values that break up of the cerebral system from its previous condition which signalises the earlier stages of general paralysis. Yet Nietzsche's own writings, particularly his letters, reveal how potent was the stimulus exercised on his ego by those nervous headaches which hounded him over the Continent. To prevent defeat his will had to be perpetually strained to the maximum pitch of tension. The sweets of comfort being denied him, the only alternative left was to find a kind of super-happiness in the ecstasies and exultations of that Titanic contest which was perpetually fought on the battlefield of his own person. Let him speak for himself: "I made of my wish to get well, to live, my philosophy-it should, in fact, be noted-the years when my vitality descended to its minimum were those when I ceased to be a pessimist."

We have not, however, at this juncture space to elaborate further the theory of the superman. Let it be enough to say that it is the raising to the nth power of the spirit of struggling and aggressive efficiency, and the venting of an over-full vitality by the creation of new values out of the wealth of the individual ego. As, however, the glorification of strength involves, and logically so, the degradation of weakness, and "to build up a sanctuary it is necessary for a sanctuary to be destroyed," it is not surprising that Nietzsche should clear the ground for his new creations by a ferocious bombardment of the crumbling ruins that still encumbered the site. Schopenhauer, who had been the fount from which Nietzsche's philosophic youth had drawn its inspiration before, as it were, he had found him out, is always treated with a certain amount of respect. But the arch-enemy was the, to him, poisonous system of altruism, self-annihilation, and world-renouncement which was called Christianity.

The cynical may smile at the inordinate and concentrated frenzy of this attack. "Is not your wildly militant prophet simply wasting his powder and shot? Who in his senses ever heard of Christianity being taken au pied de la lettre, even by the most orthodox of modern bishops? What is it, to use another metaphor, but flogging a dead horse?" To which Nietzsche's answer would be that it is by removing the foundations that you remove also the superstructure, or to translate our metaphor, "Let me kill Christianity, and I kill at the same time all that system of altruism for altruism's sake, of abstract truth for the sake of abstract truth, which is built on that hateful foundation." It may also be observed that, even apart from the poetic and prophetic licence to which a man writing under such circumstances would be legitimately entitled, there are even now not wanting people who do in point of fact take Christianity with all the implicit seriousness of the medi?val monks or the early Fathers. It is, indeed, a phenomenon not without a certain intrinsic humour, that almost at the very moment when Tolstoi was making his pathetic efforts to resuscitate literal Christianity with the abortive tears of pity, Nietzsche should swing along to flagellate the semi-inanimate ghost of the bleeding God, in no monkish spirit, forsooth, but with all the grim and scientific energy of the most enthusiastic of executioners, compared to whom Voltaire was but the most urbane of wits, and Heine the most innocuous of schoolboys. Having thus taken a brief view of the targets, and of the implacable and very serious spirit that animates the assailant, let us glance briefly at the chief lines of attack.