I
The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic! Nietzsche was well advised to append the word "polemic" to his title, for it supplies the key to his whole position. To some extent, no doubt, the "Genealogy" may be the expression in more philosophic language of those ideas, which find in Zarathustra their poetic and almost biblical formulation. Yet philosopher though he may be, Nietzsche is no abstract thinker sitting down stolidly on some icy height to solve the riddle of the universe, whatever it may be, by the rigid rules of abstract logic, so that he may placidly present the solution to such members of the public as happen to be interested in metaphysics. On the contrary his mind, and even more truly his temperament, are made up from the outset. Certain ideas grip him so tensely, and for him, at any rate, constitute so fiery and omnipresent a reality, as to be from his standpoint things transcending the mere cavillings of logicians and scientists.
"You ask me why," says Zarathustra, "but I say unto you I am not one of those whom one may ask their why."
The same idea is more technically expressed in the preface to the Genealogy—"that new immoral, or at least, 'amoral' a priori, and that 'categorical imperative,' which was its voice (but, oh I how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems), to which since then I have given more and more obedience (and, indeed, what is more than obedience)." For, startling though it may seem to the orthodox, albeit acceptable enough to the acolytes of the new faith, the fact stands out irresistibly, that all the later writings of Nietzsche are saturated through and through with the religious spirit.
For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. The content, indeed, of the religion of this converse Christ may be diametrically opposed to that of the original, but the machinery is the same. With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma of self-expression and self-glorification. Turn, in fact, the doctrines of Christianity upside down, but leave constant the missionary enthusiasm of its founder, his chronic fits of extreme depression and extreme exaltation, and you have the quintessence of Nietzsche.
As, however, it is the boast of all religions that they are beyond the realms of exact logic and empirical science, it would be as unfair to look in our prophet's polemic for the mathematical accuracy of a Euclidian proposition, as it would be to search for such accuracy amid the many grandiose and tragic thoughts that loom over the invectives of Isaiah, Jesus, and Jeremiah.
Not, indeed, but what there are many new, swift, and illuminating truths in our philosopher's gospel, just as there were in the pronouncements of his afore-said Hebrew brethren. But the essence, the raison d'être of the whole book is purely polemical. Nietzsche is out to kill, and so long as his weapons effectually subserve that object, he is, and quite logically, indifferent to aught else.
Before, however, we analyse in detail the philosophy of this book, it is advisable to adjust our sights to those particular targets on which Nietzsche trained his gigantic and murderous artillery. We shall also have a better prospect of getting really into touch with "the very inner pulse of the machine," the real core of this philosophy, if we take a necessarily short, but it is to be hoped none the less vivid, glance at those reasons which induced Nietzsche to envisage the objects of his attack with so tense and implacable a hatred.
Now Nietzsche found his intellectual jumping-off ground in that hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism stuck on a pedestal of sex, which constituted the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the essence of the fashionable pessimism of mid-century Germany. To endeavour to condense one of the most brilliant and elaborate systems of the last century into a few words is at best a delicate and hazardous task, yet perhaps we may adumbrate tentatively the radical elements which spurred Nietzsche to so sanguinary a revolt.
Life according to Schopenhauer was a sorry failure, a thing not worth living on its merits, but kept going by the driving impetus of a blind life-force and knit with a mutual pity. Life then being intrinsically evil, the remedy for the evil was to live as little as possible—" Draw your desire back from the world so that there may be an end of that phenomenal life which is nothing but grief." Apart from general asceticism, there were two specific anodynes prescribed by Schopenhauer for the disease called life—art which transcended life, and lifted the spectator or listener on to another plane, and philosophy which, as it were, blunted the sting of life by the contemplation of the essentially unreal nature of the phenomenal universe. But the greatest good was Nirvana, a kind of Pantheistic Absolute of negativity, into which one eventually merged, to enjoy the supreme paradox of a peaceful self-consciousness of one's own nothingness.