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Nietzsche apparently is only familiar with the sanctions of morality and the criterion of good and evil as they are represented in the institutions and thoughts established by history, and seeing how frequently they serve as tools in the hands of the crafty for the oppression of the unsophisticated masses of the people, he discards them as utterly worthless. Hence his truly magnificent wrath, his disgust, his contempt for underling man, for the masses, this muddy stream of present mankind.
If Nietzsche had dug deeper, he would have found that there is after all a deep significance in moral ideals, for there is an authority above the self by which the worth of the self must be measured. Truth[Pg 129] is not a mere creature of the self, but is the comprehension of the immutable eternal laws of being which constitute the norm of existence. Our self, "that creating, willing, valuing 'I,' which (according to Nietzsche) is the measure and value of all things," is itself measured by that eternal norm of being, the existence of which Nietzsche does not recognize.
What is true of Nietzsche applies in all fundamental questions also to his predecessor, Max Stirner. It applies to individualism in any form if carried to its consistent and most extreme consequences.
Nietzsche is blind to the truth that there is a norm above the self, and that this norm is the source of duty and the object of religion; he therefore denies the very existence of duty, of conviction, of moral principles, of sympathy with the suffering, of authority in any shape, and yet he dares to condemn man in the shape of the present generation of mankind. What right has he, then, to judge the sovereign self of to-day and to announce the coming of another self in the overman? From the principles of his philosophical anarchism he has no right to denounce mankind of to-day, as an underling; for if there is no objective standard of worth, there is no sense in distinguishing between the underman of to-day and the overman of a nobler future.
On this point, however, Nietzsche deviates from his predecessor Stirner. The latter is more consistent as an individualist, but the former appeals strongly to the egoism of the individual.
Nietzsche is a Titan and he is truly Titanic in his rebellion against the smallness of everything that means to be an incarnation of what is great and noble and holy. But he does not protest against the smallness of the representatives of truth and right, he protests against truth and right themselves, and thus he is not merely Titanic, but a genuine Titan,—attempting to take the heavens by storm, a monster, not superhuman but inhuman in proportions, in sentiment and in spirit. Being ingenious, he is, in his way, a genius, but he is not evenly balanced; he is eccentric and, not recognizing the authority of reason and science, makes eccentricity his maxim. Thus his grandeur becomes grotesque.
The spirit of negation, the mischief-monger Mephistopheles, says of Faust with reference to his despair of reason and science:
"Reason and Knowledge only thou despise,
The highest strength in man that lies!...
And I shall have thee fast and sure."
—Tr. by Bayard Taylor.
Being giant-like, the Titan Nietzsche has a sense only for things of large dimensions. He fails to understand the significance of the subtler relations of existence. He is clumsy like Gargantua; he is coarse in his reasoning; he is narrow in his comprehension; his horizon is limited. He sees only the massive effects of the great dynamical changes brought about by brute force; he is blind to the quiet and slow but more powerful[Pg 131] workings of spiritual forces. The molecular forces that are invisible to the eye transform the world more thoroughly than hurricanes and thunderstorms; yet the strongest powers are the moral laws, the curses of wrong-doing and oppression, and the blessings of truthfulness, of justice, of good-will. Nietzsche sees them not; he ignores them. He measures the worth of the overman solely by his brute force.
If Nietzsche were right, the overman of the future who is going to take possession of the earth will not be nobler and better, wiser and juster than the present man, but more gory, more tiger-like, more relentless, more brutal.
Nietzsche has a truly noble longing for the advent of the overman, but he throws down the ladder on which man has been climbing up, and thus losing his foothold, he falls down to the place whence mankind started several millenniums ago.
We enjoy the rockets of Nietzsche's genius, we understand his Faust-like disappointment as to the unavailableness of science such as he knew it; we sympathize with the honesty with which he offered his thoughts to the world; we recognize the flashes of truth which occur in his sentences, uttered in the tone of a prophet; but we cannot help condemning his philosophy as unsound in its basis, his errors being the result of an immaturity of comprehension.
Nietzsche has touched upon the problem of problems, but he has not solved it. He weighs the souls of[Pg 132] his fellowmen and finds them wanting; but his own soul is not less deficient. His philosophy is well worth studying, but it is not a good guide through life. It is great only as being the gravest error, boldly, conscientiously, and seriously carried to its utmost extremes and preached as the latest word of wisdom.
It has been customary that man should justify himself before the tribunal of morality, but Nietzsche summons morality itself before his tribunal. Morality justifies herself by calling on truth, but the testimony of truth is ruled out, for truth—objective truth—is denounced as a superstition of the dark ages. Nietzsche knows truth only as a contemptible method of puny spirits to make existence conceivable—a hopeless task! Nietzsche therefore finds morality guilty as a usurper and a tyrant, and he exhorts all esprits forts to shake off the yoke.
We grant that the self should not be the slave of morality; it should not feel the "ought" as a command; it should identify itself with it and make its requirements the object of its own free will. Good-will on earth will render the law redundant; but when you wipe out the ideal of good-will itself together with its foundation, which is truth and the recognition of truth, the struggle for existence will reappear in its primitive fierceness, and mankind will return to the age of savagery. Let the esprits forts of Nietzsche's type try to realize their master's ideal, and their attempts will soon lead to their own perdition.
We read in Der arme Teufel,[1] a weekly whose radical editor would not have been prevented by conventional reasons from joining the new fad of Nietzscheanism, the following satirical comment on some modern poet of original selfhood:
"'I am against matrimony because I am a poet Wife, children, family life,—well, well! they may be good enough for the man possessed of the herding instinct But I object to trivialities in my own life. I want something stimulating, sensation, poetry 1 A wife would be prosaic to me, simply on account of being my wife; and children who would call me papa would be disgusting. Poetry I need! Poetry!' Thus he spoke to a friend, and when the latter was gone continued his letter reproaching a waitress for again asking for money and at the same time reflecting upon the purity of her relations to the bartender who, she pretended, was her cousin only...."
