Page 25 of 26
If marriage relations were abolished to-day, would not in the course of time some new form of marriage be established? Those who are too proud to utilize the experiences of past generations, will have to repeat them for themselves and must wade through their follies, sins, errors, and suffer all the consequences and undergo their penalties.
Nietzsche tries to produce a Csar by teaching his followers to imitate the vices of a Catiline; he would raise gods by begetting Titans; he endeavors to give a nobler and better standard to mankind, not by lifting[Pg 134] the people higher and rendering them more efficient, but by depriving them of all wisdom and making them more pretentious.
If the ethics of Nietzsche were accepted to-day as authoritative, and if people at large acted accordingly, the world would be benefited in one respect, viz., hypocrisy would cease, and the selfishness of mankind would manifest itself in all its nude bestiality. Passions would have full sway; lust, robbery, jealousy, murder, and revenge would increase, and Death in all forms of wild outbursts would reap a richer harvest than he ever did in the days of prehistoric savage life. The result would be a pruning on a grand scale, and after a few bloody decades those only would survive who either by nature or by hypocritical self-control deemed it best to keep the lower passions and the too prurient instincts of their selfhood in proper check, and then the old-fashioned rules of morality, which Nietzsche declared antiquated, would be given a new trial in the new order of things. They might receive a different sanction, but they would find recognition.
Nietzsche forgets that the present social order originated from that general free-for-all fight which he commends, and that if we begin at the start we should naturally run through the same or a similar course of development to the same or very similar conditions. Will it not be better to go on improving than to revert to the primitive state of savagery?
There are superstitious notions about the nature of[Pg 135] the sanction of ethics, but for that reason the moral ideals of mankind remain as firmly established as ever.
The self is not the standard of measurement for good and evil, right and wrong, as Nietzsche claims in agreement with the sophists of old; the self is only the condition to which and under which it applies. There is no good and evil in the purely physical world, there is no suffering, no pain, no anguish—all this originates with the rise of organized animal life which is endowed with sentiency; and further there is no goodness and badness, no morality until the animal rises to the height of comprehending the nature of evil. The tiger is in himself neither good nor bad, but he makes himself a cause of suffering to others; and thus he is by them regarded as bad. Goodness and badness are relative, but they are not for that reason unreal.
It is true that there is no "ought" in the world as an "ought"; nor are there metaphysical ghosts of divine commandments revealing themselves. But man learns the lesson how to avoid evil and reducing it to brief rules which are easily remembered, he calls them "commandments."
Buddha was aware that there is no metaphysical ghost of an "ought," and being the first positivist before positivism was ever thought of, his decalogue is officially called "avoiding the ten evils," not "the ten commandments," the latter being a popular term of later origin.
Granting that there is no metaphysical "ought" in[Pg 136] the world and that it finds application only in the domain of animate life through the presence of the self or rather of many selves, we fail to see that the self is the creator of the norm of good and evil. Granting also that there are degrees of comprehending the nature of evil and that different applications naturally result under different conditions, we cannot for that reason argue that ethics are purely subjective and that there is no objective norm that underlies the moral evolution of mankind and comes out in the progress of civilization more and more in its purity.
Nietzsche is like a schoolboy whose teacher is an inefficient pedant. He rebels against his authority and having had but poor instruction proclaims that the multiplication table is a mere superstition with which the old man tries to enslave the free minds of his scholars. Are there not different solutions possible of the same example and has not every one to regard his own solution as the right solution? How can the teacher claim that he is the standard of truth? Why, the very attempt at setting up a standard of any kind is tyranny and the recognition of it is a self-imposed slavery. There is no rightness save the rightness that can be maintained in a general hand-to-hand contest, for it is ultimately the fist that decides all controversies.
Nietzsche calls himself an atheist; he denies the existence of God in any form, and thus carries atheism to an extreme where it breaks down in self-contradiction. We understand by God (whether personal, impersonal,[Pg 137] or superpersonal) that something which determines the course of life; the factors that shape the world, including ourselves; the law to which we must adjust our conduct. Nietzsche enthrones the self in the place of God, but for all practical purposes his God is blunt success and survival of the fittest in the crude sense of the term; for according to his philosophy the self must heed survival in the struggle for existence alone, and that, therefore, is his God.
Nietzsche's God is power, i. e., overwhelming force, which allows the wolf to eat the lamb. He ignores the power of the still small voice, the effectiveness of law in the world which makes it possible that man, the over-brute, is not the most ferocious, the most muscular, or the strongest animal. Nietzsche regards the cosmic order, in accommodation to which ethical codes have been invented, as a mere superstition. Thus it will come to pass that Nietzsche's type of the overman, should it really make its appearance on earth, would be wiped out as surely as the lion, the king of the beasts, the proud pseudo-overbrute of the animals, will be exterminated in course of time. The lion has a chance for survival only behind the bars of the zological gardens or when he allows himself to be tamed by man, that weakling among the brutes whose power has been built up by a comprehension of the sway of the invisible laws of life, physical, mental and moral.
What is the secret of Nietzsche's success? While other men of greater consistency, among them his predecessor[Pg 138] Stirner, failed, he attained an unparalleled fame, and his philosophy exercised an extraordinary influence upon large classes of people not only in Germany but also abroad, in Russia, in France, in the United States and even in conservative England.
We must concede that Nietzsche possesses a poetic power of oratory; he appeals to sentiment; he is not much of a thinker, not a philosopher, but a leader and a prophet, and as such he stands for the most extreme egoism. Nietzsche attempts to establish the absolute sovereignty of the individual and grants a most irresponsible freedom to the man who dares; and this principle of doing away with moral maxims has made him popular.
The truth is that our moral sanctions are no longer accepted. People still believe in God, in the authority of church and state, but their belief is no longer a living faith. Whatever they may think of God, the old God, the God of traditional dogmatism, is gone. He is no longer a living power in the hearts of the people; and so, large masses rejoice to have the proclamation frankly stated that God is dead, that they need no longer fear hell, and that the chains of their slavery are broken.
