204
The Two Species
The few have a conception of Life different from that of the many. To the latter still pertain such notions as "do as you would be done by," and so forth. They understand a morality but not the end of morality. The few, however, who understand both the morality and the reason for it, who have a conception of Life more difficult and unyielding, seem to the many cold and a little inhuman. The lives of the latter, on the other hand, appear to the few as a naively happy, narrow and absurd form of existence.
205
Nietzsche
What was Nietzsche, that subtlest of modern riddles? First, a great tragic poet: it was by a divine accident that he was at the same time a profound thinker and the deepest psychologist. But his tragic affirmative was the core of his work, of which thought and analysis were but outgrowths. Without it, his subtlety might have made him another Pascal. The Will to Power, which makes suffering integral in Life; the Order of Rank whereby the bulk of mankind are doomed to slavery; the Superman himself, that most sublime child of Tragedy; and the last affirmation, the Eternal Recurrence: these are the conceptions of a tragic poet. It is, indeed, by virtue of his tragic view of Life that Nietzsche is for us a force of such value. For only by means of it could modern existence, sunk in scepticism, pessimism and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, be re-created.
For the last two centuries Europe has been under the domination of the concept of Happiness as progress. Altruism, the ideology of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, altruism as a means of universalizing Happiness, was preached in the eighteenth century; until after a while it was seen by such clear-sighted observers as Voltaire that men did not obey this imperative of altruism; therefore they were condemned: the moral indignation of the eighteenth century, the century of censoriousness par excellence, was the result. First, an impossible morality was demanded, and for the attainment of an unattainable ideal; then Man was condemned because he failed to comply with it, because he was Man. Thus in the end the ideal of the greatest happiness worked out in pessimism: Life became hideous and, worst of all, immoral, to the utilitarian, when it was seen that altruism and happiness are alike impossible. Schopenhauer is here the heir of Voltaire: the moral condemnation of the one has become in the other a condemnation of Life itself, more profound, more poetical, more logical. Altruism has in Schopenhauer deepened into Pity; for Pity is altruism bereft of the illusion of Happiness.
How was Man to avoid now the almost inevitable bourne of Nihilism? By renouncing altogether Happiness as a value; by restoring a conception of Life in which Happiness was neither a positive nor a negative standard, but something irrelevant, an accident: in short, by setting up a tragic conception of Life. This was the task of Nietzsche: in how far he succeeded how can we yet say?
206
Again