Part 3

"A fellow says: 'I own no school or college; No master lives whom I acknowledge; And pray don't entertain the thought That from the dead I e'er learned aught.' This, if I rightly understand, Means: 'I'm a fool by own command.'"

Nietzsche observes that the thoughts of most philosophers are secretly guided by instincts. He feels that all thought is at bottom a "will for power," and the will for truth has no right to exist except it serve the will for power. He reproaches philosophers for glorifying truth.

Fichte in his _Duties of the Scholar_ says:

"My life and my fate are nothing; but the results of my life are of great importance. I am a priest of Truth; I am in the service of Truth; I feel under obligation to do, to risk, and to suffer anything for truth."

Nietzsche declares that this is shallow. Will for truth, he says, should be called "will to make being thinkable." Here, it seems to us, Nietzsche simply replaces the word "truth" by one of its functions. Truth is a systematic representation of reality, a comprehensive description of facts; the result being that "existence is made thinkable."

Nietzsche is in a certain sense right when he says that truth in itself is nothing; for every representation of reality must serve a purpose, otherwise it is superfluous and useless. And the purpose of truth is the furtherance of life. Nietzsche instinctively hits the right thing in saying that at the bottom of philosophy there is the will for power. In spite of our school-philosopher's vain declamations of "science for its own sake," genuine philosophy will never be anything else than a method for the acquisition of power. But this method is truth. Nietzsche errs when he declares that "the head is merely the intestine of the heart." The head endeavors to find out the truth, and the truth is not purely subjective. It is true that truth is of no use to a man unless he makes it his own; he must possess it; it must be part of himself, but he cannot create it. Truth cannot be made; it must be discovered. Since the scholar's specialized business is the elucidation of the method of discovering the truth--not its purpose, not its application in practical life--Fichte's ideal of the aim of scholarship remains justified.

Omit the ideal of truth in a philosophy, and it becomes an _ignis fatuus_, a will-o'-the-wisp, that will lead people astray. Truth makes existence thinkable, but thinkableness alone is not as yet a test of truth. The ultimate test of truth is its practical application. There is something wrong with a theory that does not work, and thus the self has a master, which is reality, the world in which it lives, with its laws and actualities. The subjective self must measure its worth by the objective standard of truth--to be obtained through exact inquiry and scientific investigation.

The will for power, in order to succeed, must be clarified by a methodical comprehension of facts and conditions. The contradictory impulses in one's own self must be systematized so that they will not collide and mutually annihilate themselves; and the comprehension of this orderly disposition is called reason.

Nietzsche is on the right track when he ridicules such ideals as "virtue for virtue's sake," and even "truth for truth's sake." Virtue and truth are for the sake of life. They have not their purpose in themselves, but their nature consists in serving the expansion and further growth of the human soul. This is a truth which we have always insisted upon and which becomes apparent when those people who speak of virtue for its own sake try to define virtue, or determine the ultimate standard of right and wrong, of goodness and badness. We say, that whatever enhances soulgrowth, thus producing higher life and begetting a superior humanity, is good; while whatever cripples or retards those aspirations is bad. Further, truth is not holy in itself. It becomes holy in the measure that it serves man's holiest aspirations. We sometimes meet among scientists, and especially among philologists, men who with the ideal of "truth for truth's sake," pursue some very trivial investigations, such, for example, as the use of the accusative after certain prepositions in Greek, or how often Homer is guilty of a hiatus. They resemble Faust's famulus Wagner, whom Faust characterizes as a fool

".... whose choice is To stick in shallow trash for ever more, Who digs with eager hand for buried ore, And when he finds an angle-worm rejoices."

Thus there are many trivial truths of no importance, the investigation of which serves no useful purpose. For instance, whether the correct pronunciation of the Greek letter _êta_; was _ee_ or _ay_ need not concern us much, and the philologist who devotes all his life and his best strength to its settlement is rather to be pitied than admired. Various truths are very different in value, for life and truth become holy according to their importance. All this granted, we need not, with Nietzsche, discard truth, reason, virtue, and all moral aspirations.

Nietzsche apparently is under the illusion that reason, systematic thought, moral discipline and self-control, are external powers, and in his love of liberty he objects to their authority. Did he ever consider that thought is not an external agent, but a clarification of man's instincts, and that discipline is, or at least in its purpose and final aim ought to be, self-regulation, so that our contradictory thoughts would not wage an internecine war? Thus, Nietzsche, the instinct-philosopher, appears as an ingenious boy whose very immaturity is regarded by himself as the highest blossom of his existence. Like an intoxicated youth, he revels in his irresponsibility and laughs at the man who has learned to take life seriously. Because the love of truth originates from instincts, Nietzsche treats it as a mere instinct, and nothing else. He forgets that in the evolution of man's soul all instincts develop into something higher than instinct, and the love of truth develops into systematic science.

Nietzsche never investigated what his own self consisted of. He never analyzed his individuality. Other-wise he would have learned that he received the most valuable part of his being from others, and that the bundle of instincts which he called his sovereign self was nothing but the heirloom of the ages that preceded him. In spite of his repudiation of any debt to others, he was but the continuation of others. But he boldly carried his individualism, if not to its logical conclusions, yet to its moral applications. When speaking of the Order of Assassins of the times of the Crusades, he said with enthusiasm: "The highest secret of their leaders was, 'Nothing is true, everything is allowed!'" And Nietzsche adds: "That indeed, was liberty of spirit; that dismissed even the belief in truth." The philosopher of instinct even regards the adherence to truth as slavery and the proclamation of truth as dogmatism.

[1] See Nietzsche's poems in the appendix to _A Genealogy of Morals_, Eng. ed., Macmillan, p. 248.

THE OVERMAN

He quintessence of Nietzsche's philosophy is the "overman." What is the overman?

The word (_Uebermensch_) comes from a good mint; it is of Goethe's coinage, and he used it in the sense of an awe-inspiring being, almost in the sense of _Unmensch_, to characterize Faust, the titanic man of high aims and undaunted courage,--the man who would not be moved in the presence of hell and pursued his aspirations in spite of the forbidding countenance of God and the ugly grin of Satan. But the same expression was used in its proper sense about two and a half millenniums ago in ancient China, where at the time of Lao-tze the term _chiün jen_ [Chin. chars], "superior man," or _chiün tse_, "superior sage," was in common usage. But the overman or _chiün jen_ of Lao-tze, of Confucius and other Chinese sages is not a man of power, not a Napoleon, not an unprincipled tyrant, not a self-seeker of domineering will, not a man whose ego and its welfare is his sole and exclusive aim, but a Christlike figure, who puts his self behind and thus makes his self--a nobler and better self--come to the front, who does not retaliate, but returns good for evil,[1] a man (as the Greek sage describes him) who would rather suffer wrong than commit wrong.[2]

This kind of higher man is the very opposite of Nietzsche's overman, and it is the spirit of this nobler conception of a higher humanity which furnishes the best ideas of all the religions of the world, of Lao-tze's Taoism, of Buddhism and of Christianity.

Alexander Tille, the English translator of Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, translates the word _Uebermensch_ by "beyond-man." But "beyond" means _jenseits_; and Nietzsche wrote _über_, i. e., superior to, over, or higher than, and the literal translation "overman" appears to be the best. It is certainly better than the barbaric combination of "superman" in which Latin and Saxon are mixed against one of the main rules for the construction of words. Say "superhuman" and "overman," but not "overhuman" or "superman." Emerson in a similar vein, when attempting to characterize that which is higher than the soul, invented the term "oversoul," and I can see no objection to the word "overman."

The overman is the higher man, the superhuman man of the future, a higher, nobler, more powerful, a better being than the present man! What a splendid idea! Since evolution has been accepted as a truth, we may fairly trust that we all believe in the overman. All our reformers believe in the possibility of realizing a higher mankind. We Americans especially have faith in the coming of the kingdom of the overman, and our endeavor is concentrated in hastening his arrival. The question is only, What is the overman and how can we make this ideal of a higher development actual?

Happy Nietzsche! You need not trouble yourself about consistency; you reject all ideals as superstitions, and then introduce an ideal of your own. "There you see," says an admirer of Nietzsche, "what a splendid principle it is not to own any allegiance to logic, or rule, or consistency. The best thought of Nietzsche's would never have been uttered if he had remained faithful to his own principles."

However ingenious the idea of an overman may be, Nietzsche carries his propositions to such extremes that in spite of many flashes of truth they become in the end ridiculous and even absurd. His ideal is good, but he utterly fails to comprehend its nature and also the mode in which alone the overman can be realized.

Nietzsche proclaims the coming of the "overman," but his overman is not superior by intellect, wisdom, or nobility of character, but by vigor, by strength, by an unbending desire for power and an unscrupulous determination. The blond barbarian of the north who tramples under foot the citizens of Greece and Rome, Napoleon I, and the Assyrian conqueror,--such are his heroes in whom this higher manhood formerly manifested itself.

He saw in the history of human thought, the development of the notion of the "true world," which to him was a mere subjective phantom, a superstition; but a reaction must set in, and he prophesied that the doom of nihilism would sweep over the civilized world applying the torch to its temples, churches and institutions. Upon the ruins of the old world the real man, the overman, would rise and establish his own empire, an empire of unlimited power in which the herds, i. e., the common people, would become subservient. The "herd animal" (so Nietzsche called any one foolish enough to recognize morality and truth) is born to obey. He is destined to be trodden under foot by the overman who is strong, and also unscrupulous enough to use the herds and govern them.

Nietzsche was by no means under the illusion that the rule of the overman would be lasting, but he took comfort in the thought that though there would be periods in which the slaves would assert themselves and establish an era of the herd animals, the overman would nevertheless assert himself from time to time, and this was what he called his "doctrine of the eternal return"--the gospel of his philosophy. The highest summit of existence is reached in those phases of the denouement of human life when the overman has full control over the herds which are driven into the field, sheared and butchered for the sole benefit of him who knows the secret that this world has no moral significance beyond being a prey to his good pleasure. Nietzsche's hope is certainly not desirable for the mass of mankind, but even the fate of the overman himself would appear as little enviable a condition as that of the tyrant Dionysius under the sword of Damocles, or the Czar of Russia living in constant fear of the anarchistic bomb.

Nietzsche, feeling that his thoughts were untimely, lived in the hope of "the coming of the great day" on which his views would find recognition. He looked upon the present as a rebellion against the spirit of strength and vigor; Christianity especially, and its doctrine of humility and love for the down-trodden was hateful to him. He speaks of it as a rebellion of slaves and places in the same category the democraticism that now characterizes the tendency of human development which he denounces as a pseudo-civilization.

He insists that the overman is beyond good and evil; and yet it is obvious that though he claims to be the first philosopher who maintained the principle of unmorality, he was only the first philosopher boldly to proclaim it. His maxim (or lack of maxims) has been stealthily and secretly in use among all those classes whom he calls "overmen," great and small. The great overmen are conquerors and tyrants, who meteorlike appear and disappear, the small ones are commonly characterized as the criminal classes; but there is this difference between the two, that the former, at least so far as they have succeeded, recognize the absolute necessity of establishing law and order, and though they may temporarily have infringed upon the rules of morality themselves, they have finally come always to the conclusion that in order to maintain their position they must enforce upon others the usual rules of morality.

Both Alexander and Cæsar were magnanimous at the right moment. They showed mercy to the vanquished, they exercised justice frequently against their own personal likes or dislikes, and were by no means men of impulse as Nietzsche would have his overman be. The same is true of Napoleon whose success is mainly due to making himself subservient to the needs of his age. As soon as he assumed the highest power in France, Napoleon replaced the frivolous tone at his court, to which his first wife Josephine had been accustomed, by an observance of so-called _bourgeois_ decency, and he enforced it against her inclinations and his own.

Further, Napoleon served the interests of Germany more than is commonly acknowledged by sweeping out of existence the mediæval system of innumerable sovereigns, ecclesiastical as well as secular, who in conformity with the conservative tenor of the German people had irremediably ensconced themselves in their hereditary rights to the disadvantage of the people. Moreover, the _Code Napoleon_, the new law book, perhaps the most enduring work of Napoleon, was compiled by the jurists of the time, not because Napoleon cared for justice, but because he saw that the only way of establishing a stable government was by acknowledging rules of equity and by enforcing their recognition. It is true that Napoleon made his service in the cause of right and justice a pedestal for himself, but in contrast to Nietzsche's ideas we must notice that this recognition of principle was the only way of success to a man whose natural tendency was an unbounded egotism, an unlimited desire for power.

In spite of his enthusiasm in announcing the advent of an overman, Nietzsche would be a poor adviser for a rising usurper. He would be able to cause a great upheaval, to bring about a Volcanic eruption, or to raise a thunderstorm wherever restlessness prevails, but his philosophy lacks the principle of using discretion, or advising self-discipline, of applying scientific methods--all of which is indispensable for success. He preaches boldness, not wisdom; and a hero after Nietzsche's heart would be like a navigator who courageously ventures into the storm but scorns a chart and leaves the mariners' compass behind; he would steer not as circumstances demand but according to his own sweet will, and would be wrecked before ever reaching the harbor of overmanhood.

How much greater is the ideal of the overman as taught by the ancient philosopher of China! He, the _chiün jen_, the superior man, does not need power either political or financial to be great; he does not need a pedestal of oppressed slaves to stand on; he is great in himself, because he has a great compassionate heart and a broad comprehensive mind. He is simple, and, as we read in the _Tao Teh King_, "He wears wool [is not dressed in silk and purple] and wears his jewel concealed in his bosom."

[1] _Lao-tse's Tao Teh King_, Chaps. 49 and 63.

[2] For a collection of Greek quotations on the ethics of returning good for evil, see _The Open Court_, Vol. XV, 1901, pp. 9-12.

ZARATHUSTRA

To those who have not the time to wade through the twelve volumes of Nietzsche's works and yet wish to become acquainted with him at his best, we recommend a perusal of his book _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. It is original and interesting, full of striking passages, sometimes flashes with deep truths, then again is sterile and unprofitable, or even tedious, and sometimes absurd; but at any rate it presents the embodiment of Nietzsche's grandest thoughts in their most attractive and characteristic form. We need scarcely warn the reader that Zarathustra is only another name for Friedrich Nietzsche and has nothing to do with the historical person of that name, the great Iranian prophet, the founder of Mazdaism.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a hermit philosopher who, weary of his wisdom, leaves his cave and comes to mingle with men, to teach them the overman. He meets a saint who loves God, and Zarathustra leaving him says: "Is it possible? This old saint in his forest has not yet heard that God is dead!"

Zarathustra preaches to a crowd in the market:

"I teach you the overman. Man is a something that shall be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass him?

"All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and are ye going to be the ebb of this great tide and rather revert to the animal than surpass man?

"What with man is the ape? A joke or a sore shame. Man shall be the same for the overman, a joke or a sore shame.

"Behold, I teach you the overman!

"The overman is the significance of the earth. Your will shall say; the overman shall be the significance of the earth.

"I conjure you, my brethren, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak unto you of superterrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are whether they know it or not.

"Verily, a muddy stream is man. One must be the ocean to be able to receive a muddy stream without becoming unclean.

"Behold, I teach you the overman: he is that ocean, in him your great contempt can sink.

"What is the greatest thing ye can experience? That is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which not only your happiness, but your reason and virtue as well, turn loathsome.

"I love him who is of a free spirit and of a free heart: thus his head is merely the intestine of his heart, but his heart driveth him to destruction.

"I love all those who are like heavy drops falling one by one from the dark cloud lowering over men: they announce the coming of the lightning and perish in the announcing.

"Behold, I am an announcer of the lightning and a heavy drop from the clouds; that lightning's name it the overman."

Zarathustra comes as an enemy of the good and the just. He says:

"Lo, the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh to pieces their tables of values,--the law-breaker, the criminal:--but he is the creator.

"The destroyer of morality I am called by the good and just: my tale is immoral."

Nietzsche's favorite animals are the proud eagle and the cunning serpent, the former because it typifies aristocracy, the latter as the wisest among all creatures of the earth. It is a strange and exceptional combination, for these two animals are commonly represented as enemies. The eagle and serpent was the emblem of ancient Elis and is at present the coat-of-arms of Mexico, but in both cases the eagle is interpreted to be the conqueror of the serpent, not its friend, carrying it as his prey in his claws.

Zarathustra's philosophy is a combination of the eagle's pride and the serpent's wisdom, which Nietzsche describes thus:

"Lo! an eagle swept through the air in wide circles, a serpent hanging from it not like a prey, but like a friend: coiling round its neck.

"They are mine animals,' said Zarathustra and rejoiced heartily.

"The proudest animal under the sun, and the wisest animal under the sun have set out to reconnoitre.

"They wish to learn whether Zarathustra still liveth. Verily, do I still live.

"More dangerous than among animals I found it among men. Dangerous ways are taken by Zarathustra. Let mine animals lead me!"

Here is a sentence worth quoting:

"Of all that is written I love only that which the writer wrote with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt learn that blood is spirit."

In another chapter on the back-worlds-men Nietzsche writes:

"Once Zarathustra threw his spell beyond man, like all back-worlds-men. Then the world seemed to me the work of a suffering and tortured God.

"Alas! brethren, that God whom I created was man's work and man's madness, like all Gods!

"Man he was, and but a poor piece of man and the I. From mine own ashes and flame it came unto me, that ghost yea verily! It did not come unto me from beyond!

"What happened, brethren? I overcame myself, the sufferer, and carrying mine own ashes unto the mountains invented for myself a brighter flame. And lo! the ghost departed from me!

"Now to me, the convalescent, it would be suffering and pain to believe in such ghosts: suffering it would be for me and humiliation. Thus spake I unto the back-worlds-men."

Nietzsche's self is not ideal but material; it is not thought, not even the will, but the body. The following passage sounds like Vedantism as interpreted by a materialist:

"He who is awake and knoweth saith: Body I am throughout, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for a something in body.

"Body is one great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a herdsman.

"Also thy little reason, my brother, which thou callest 'spirit'--it is a tool of thy body, a little tool and toy of thy great reason.

"T, thou sayest and art proud of that word. But the greater thing is--which thou wilt not believe--thy body and its great reason. It doth not say T, but it is the acting 'I.'

"The self ever listeneth and seeketh: it compareth, subdueth, conquereth, destroyeth. It ruleth and is the ruler of the 'I' as well.

"Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, standeth a mighty lord, an unknown wise man--whose name is self. In thy body he dwelleth, thy body he is.