Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays

by Lev Shestov

In the first volume of Human, All too Human, which Nietzsche wrote at the very beginning of his disease, when he was still far from final victory and chiefly told of his defeats, there is the following remarkable, though half-involuntary confession: 'The complete irresponsibility of Man for his actions and his being is the bitterest drop for the man of knowledge to drink, since he has been accustomed to see in responsibility and duty the very patent of his title to manhood.'

Much bitterness has the inquiring spirit to swallow, but the bitterest of all is in the knowledge that his moral qualities, his readiness to fulfil his duty ungrudgingly, gives him no preference over other men. He thought he was a man of noble rank, even a prince of the blood, crowned with a crown, and the other men boorish peasantry—but he is just the same, a peasant, the same as all the rest. His patent of nobility was that for which he fulfilled his most arduous duty and made sacrifices; in it he saw the meaning of life. And when it is suddenly revealed that there is no provision made for titles or patents, it is a horrible catastrophe, a cataclysm—and life loses all meaning. Evidently the conviction expressed with such moving frankness in these words, was with Nietzsche a second nature, which he could not master all his life long. What is the Superman but a title, a patent, giving the right to be called a noble among the canaille? What is the pathos of distance and all Nietzsche's teaching of ranks? The formula, beyond good and evil, was by no means so all-destructive as at first sight it seemed. On the contrary, by erasing certain laws graven on the tables of mankind of old, that formula as it were revealed other commandments, obliterated by time, and therefore invisible to many.

All morality, all good in and for itself is rejected, but the patent of nobility grows more precious until it becomes, if not the only value, at least the chief. Life loses its meaning once titles and ranks are destroyed, once he is deprived of the right to hold his head high, to throw out his chest, his belly even, and to look with contempt upon those about him.

In order to show to what extent the doctrine of rank has become attached to the human soul, I would recall the words of the Gospel about the first and last. Christ, who seemed to speak in a language utterly new, who taught men to despise earthly blessings—riches, fame, honours, who so easily yielded Caesar his due, because he thought that only Caesar would find it useful—Christ himself, when he spoke to men, did not think it possible to take away from them their hope of distinction. 'The first shall be last.' What will there be first and second there, too? Yes, so it stands in the Gospel. Is it because there is indeed in the division of men into ranks something original and warrantable, or is it because Christ who spoke to humankind could not but use human words? It may be that, but for that promise, and generally the series of promises of rewards, accessible to the human understanding, the Gospel would not have fulfilled its great historic mission, it would have passed unnoticed on the earth, and no one would have detected or recognised in it the Evangel. Christ knew that men could renounce all things, save the right to superiority alone, to superiority over one's neighbours, to that which Nietzsche calls 'the patent of nobility.' Without that superiority men of a certain kind cannot live. They become what the Germans so appropriately call Vogelfrei, deprived of the protection of the laws, since the laws are the only source of their right. Rude, nonsensical, disgusting reality—against which, I repeat, their only defence is the patent of nobility, the unwritten charter—approaches them closer and closer, with more and more menace and importunacy, and claims its right. 'If you are the same as all other men,' it says, 'take your experience of life from me, fulfil your trivial obligations, worse than that, accept from me the fines and reprimands to which the rank and file are subject, even to corporal punishment.' How could he accept these degrading conditions who had been used to think he had the right to carry his head high, to be proud and independent? Nietzsche tries with dull submissiveness to swallow the horrible bitterness of his confession, but courage and endurance, even his courage and endurance, are not enough for this his greatest and most terrible task. He cannot bear the horror of a life deprived of rights and defences: he seeks again for power and authority which would protect him and give him his lost rights again. He will not rest until he receives under another name a restitutio in integrum of all the rights which had previously been his.

And surely not Nietzsche alone acted thus. The whole history of ethics, the whole history of philosophy is to no small degree the incessant search for prerogative and privilege, patents and charters. The Christians—Tolstoi and Dostoevsky—do not in the least differ from the enemy of Christianity, Nietzsche. The humble Jew, Spinoza, and the meek pagan, Socrates, the idealist Plato, and the idealist Aristotle, the founders of the newest, noblest and loftiest systems, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, even Schopenhauer, the pessimist, all as one man seek a charter, a charter, a charter. Evidently life on earth without a charter becomes for the 'best' men a horrible nightmare and an intolerable torment. Even the founder of Christianity, who so easily renounced all privileges, considered it possible to preserve this privilege for his disciples, and perhaps—who knows?—for himself too.

Whereas if Nietzsche and those other philosophers had been able resolutely to renounce titles, ranks, and honours, which are distributed not only by morality, but by all the other Sanhedrim, real and imaginary, which are set over man; if they could have drunk this cup to the dregs, then they might have known, seen, and heard much that was suspected by none of them before. Long since men have known that the road to knowledge lies by way of a great renunciation. Neither righteousness nor genius gives a man privilege above others. He is deprived, for ever deprived, of the protection of earthly laws. There are no laws. To-day he is a king, to-morrow a slave; to-day God, to-morrow a worm; to-day first, to-morrow last. And the worm crushed by him to-day will be God, his god to-morrow. All the measures and balances by which men are distinguished one from another are defaced for ever, and there is no certainty that the place a man once occupied will still be his. And all philosophers have known this; Nietzsche, too, knew it, and by experience. He was the friend, the ally, and the collaborator of the great Wagner, the herald of a new era upon earth; and later, he grovelled in the dust, broken and crushed. And a second time this thing happened to him. When he had finished Zarathustra, he became insane, more exactly, he became half-idiot. It is true he carried the secret of the second fall with him to the grave. Yet something has reached us, for all his sister's efforts to conceal from carnal eyes the change that had befallen him. And now we ask: Is the essence of life really in the rank, the charter, the patent of nobility? And can the words of Christ be understood in their literal sense? Are not all the Sanhedrim set over man, and as it were giving meaning to his life, mere fictions, useful and even necessary in certain moments of life, but pernicious and dangerous, to say no more, when the circumstances are changed? Does not life, the real and desirable life, which men have sought for thousands of years, begin there where there is neither first nor last, righteous or sinner, genius or incapable? Is not the pursuit of recognition, of superiority, of patents and charters, of rank, that which prevents man from seeing life with its hidden miracles? And must man really seek protection in the College of Heralds, or has he another power that time cannot destroy? One may be a good, able, learned, gifted man, even a man of genius, but to demand in return any privileges whatsoever, is to betray goodness and ability, and talent and genius, and the greatest hopes of mankind. The last on earth will nowhere be first....