Portraits and Speculations

by Arthur Ransome

There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and are continually being re-made by man. “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves; that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations” of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question. The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for example, of the “widespread heaven of clear wicked spirituality,” a spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be that which is danced over, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest—be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves. He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with moralities, but asks each of his “higher men” to be true to his own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to a higher, a more laughing perfection.

After the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that is capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,” as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill with hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.

Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears, and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone. The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his remarks on self-development or war.

I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements. When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in this language an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far from the truth. Thus spake Zarathustra, that Ossianic poem of a hero of thought, Ecce Homo, in the self-assertion of which is not only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of The Birth of Tragedy; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness; in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun, wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.

In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator. In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters. When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them hoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children of his hope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them.”

In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others, he found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life, theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.” He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant, daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.

I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:

“Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then they disparaged all high hopes.

Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the day had hardly an aim.

‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it gnaweth.