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: