The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

by H. L. Mencken

"Again, sympathy thwarts the law of development, of evolution, of the survival of the fittest. It preserves what is ripe for extinction, it works in favor of life's condemned ones, it gives to life itself a gloomy aspect by the number of the ill-constituted it maintains in life.... It is both a multiplier of misery and a conservator of misery. It is the principal tool for the advancement of decadence. It leads to nothingness, to the negation of all those instincts which are at the basis of life.... But one does not say 'nothingness;' one says instead 'the other world' or 'the better life.'... This innocent rhetoric, out of the domain of religio-moral fantasy, becomes far from innocent when one realizes what tendency it conceals: the tendency hostile to life."[12]

The foregoing makes it patent that Nietzsche was a thorough-going and uncompromising biological monist. That is to say, he believed that man, while superior to all other animals because of his greater development, was, after all, merely an animal, like the rest of them; that the struggle for existence went on among human beings exactly as it went on among the lions in the jungle and the protozoa in the sea ooze, and that the law of natural selection ruled all of animated nature—mind and matter—alike. Indeed, it is but just to credit him with being the pioneer among modern monists of this school, for he stated and defended the doctrine of morphological universality at a time when practically all the evolutionists doubted it, and had pretty well proved its truth some years before Haeckel wrote his "Monism" and "The Riddle of the Universe."

To understand all of this, it is necessary to go back to Darwin and his first statement of the law of natural selection. Darwin proved, in "The Origin of the Species," that a great many more individuals of any given species of living being are born into the world each year than can possibly survive. Those that are best fitted to meet the condition of existence live on; those that are worst fitted die. The result is that, by the influence of heredity, the survivors beget a new generation in which there is a larger percentage of the fit. One might think that this would cause a greater number to survive, but inasmuch as the food and room on earth are limited, a large number must always die. But all the while the half or third, or whatever the percentage may be, which actually do survive become more and more fit. In consequence, a species, generation after generation, tends to become more and more adapted to meet life's vicissitudes, or, as the biologists say, more and more adapted to its environment.

Darwin proved that this law was true of all the lower animals and showed that it was responsible for the evolution of the lower apes into anthropoid apes, and that it could account, theoretically, for a possible evolution of anthropoid apes into man. But in "The Descent of Man" he argued that the law of natural selection ceased when man became an intelligent being. Thereafter, he said, man's own efforts worked against those of nature. Instead of letting the unfit of his race die, civilization began to protect and preserve them. The result was that nature's tendency to make all living beings more and more sturdy was set aside by man's own conviction that mere sturdiness was not the thing most to be desired. From this Darwin argued that if two tribes of human beings lived side by side, and if, in one of them, the unfit were permitted to perish, while in the other there were many "courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, and to aid and defend one another"—that in such a case, the latter tribe would make the most progress, despite its concerted effort to defy a law of nature.

Darwin's disciples agreed with him in this and some of them went to the length of asserting that civilization, in its essence, was nothing more or less than a successful defiance of this sort.[13] Herbert Spencer was much troubled by the resultant confusion and as one critic puts it,[14] the whole drift of his thought "appears to be inspired by the question: how to evade and veil the logical consequence of evolutionarism for human existence?" John Fiske, another Darwinian, accepted the situation without such disquieting doubt. "When humanity began to be evolved," he said, "an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance and the bodily life became subordinated to it."[15] Even Huxley believed that man would have to be excepted from the operation of the law of natural selection. "The ethical progress of society," he said, "depends, not on imitating the cosmic process and still less on running away from it, but in combating it." He saw that it was audacious thus to pit man against nature, but he thought that man was sufficiently important to make such an attempt and hoped "that the enterprise might meet with a certain measure of success."[16] And the other Darwinians agreed with him.[17]

As all the best critics of philosophy have pointed out,[18] any philosophical system which admits such a great contradiction fails utterly to furnish workable standards of order in the universe, and so falls short of achieving philosophy's first aim. We must either believe with the scholastics that intelligence rules, or we must believe, with Haeckel, that all things happen in obedience to invariable natural laws. We cannot believe both. A great many men, toward the beginning of the 90's, began to notice this fatal defect in Darwin's idea of human progress. In 1891 one of them pointed out the conclusion toward which it inevitably led.[19] If we admitted, he said, that humanity had set at naught the law of natural selection, we must admit that civilization was working against nature's efforts to preserve the race, and that, in the end, humanity would perish. To put it more succinctly, man might defy the law of natural selection as much as he pleased, but he could never hope to set it aside. Soon or late, he would awaken to the fact that he remained a mere animal, like the rabbit and the worm, and that, if he permitted his body to degenerate into a thing entirely lacking in strength and virility, not all the intelligence conceivable could save him.

Nietzsche saw all this clearly as early as 1877.[20] He saw that what passed for civilization, as represented by Christianity, was making such an effort to defy and counteract the law of natural selection, and he came to the conclusion that the result would be disaster. Christianity, he said, ordered that the strong should give part of their strength to the weak, and so tended to weaken the whole race. Self-sacrifice, he said, was an open defiance of nature, and so were all the other Christian virtues, in varying degree. He proposed, then, that before it was too late, humanity should reject Christianity, as the "greatest of all imaginable corruptions," and admit freely and fully that the law of natural selection was universal and that the only way to make real progress was to conform to it.

It may be asked here how Nietzsche accounted for the fact that humanity had survived so long—for the fact that the majority of men were still physically healthy and that the race, as a whole, was still fairly vigorous. He answered this in two ways. First, he denied that the race was maintaining to the full its old vigor. "The European of the present," he said, "is far below the European of the Renaissance." It would be absurd, he pointed out, to allege that the average German of 1880 was as strong and as healthy—i.e. as well fitted to his environment—as the "blond beast" who roamed the Saxon lowlands in the days of the mammoth. It would be equally absurd to maintain that the highest product of modern civilization—the town-dweller—was as vigorous and as capable of becoming the father of healthy children as the intelligent farmer, whose life was spent in approximate accordance with all the more obvious laws of health.

Nietzsche's second answer was that humanity had escaped utter degeneration and destruction because, despite its dominance as a theory of action, few men actually practiced Christianity. It was next to impossible, he said, to find a single man who, literally and absolutely, obeyed the teachings of Christ.[21] There were plenty of men who thought they were doing so, but all of them were yielding in only a partial manner. Absolute Christianity meant absolute disregard of self. It was obvious that a man who reached this state of mind would be unable to follow any gainful occupation, and so would find it impossible to preserve his own life or the lives of his children. In brief, said Nietzsche, an actual and utter Christian would perish today just as Christ perished, and so, in his own fate, would provide a conclusive argument against Christianity.

Nietzsche pointed out further that everything which makes for the preservation of the human race is diametrically opposed to the Christian ideal. Thus Christianity becomes the foe of science. The one argues that man should sit still and let God reign; the other that man should battle against the tortures which fate inflicts upon him, and try to overcome them and grow strong. Thus all science is unchristian, because, in the last analysis, the whole purpose and effort of science is to arm man against loss of energy and death, and thus make him self-reliant and unmindful of any duty of propitiating the deity. That this antagonism between Christianity and the search, for truth really exists has been shown in a practical way time and again. Since the beginning of the Christian era the church has been the bitter and tireless enemy of all science, and this enmity has been due to the fact that every member of the priest class has realized that the more a man learned the more he came to depend upon his own efforts, and the less he was given to asking help from above. In the ages of faith men prayed to the saints when they were ill. Today they send for a doctor. In the ages of faith battles were begun with supplications, and it was often possible to witness the ridiculous spectacle of both sides praying to the same God. Today every sane person knows that the victory goes to the wisest generals and largest battalions.