Part 5
He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect, and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain. When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”
Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background on which we must set his work.
The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called _Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books, we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles” at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues; because they were often written in swift succession, one after another, there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast, and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman, and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books, but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of continual exploration.
“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,” but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility. Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude. But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is desirable.
Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements, which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in practice that circumstances determine.
We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will, that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and examine the Nietzschean universe.
The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy, expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite pain:
“Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.)
Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:
“If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone, and since every one of these combinations would determine the whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all eternity.”
Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem:
“Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis, Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse: Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente: Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”
Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6] admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”
The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before every deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to perform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.” It does not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as “the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.
Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the will to power, in which that other will may or may not be included. Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power, unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area over which to exercise it.
But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity. Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again, Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding, not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.” He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with Seannchan, the poet:
“The stars had come so near me that I caught Their singing. It was praise of that great race That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied, With a high head, and open hand, and how, Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”
Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the other.
Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_ reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.” A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this: “Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life. Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner, wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I had cherished of him.”
Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati, the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying” to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest. He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually preserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art. These words were “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The latter word has been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:
1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy.”
2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”
He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an alternation of conquest and captivity:
“And if the babe is born a boy He’s given to a woman old, Who nails him down upon a rock, Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head, She pierces both his hands and feet, She cuts his heart out at his side, To make it feel both cold and heat.
Her fingers number every nerve, Just as a miser counts his gold; She lives upon his shrieks and cries, And she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth, And she becomes a virgin bright; Then he rends up his manacles, And binds her down for his delight.”
It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age” he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo, shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of Apollo.