[CHAPTER V.]
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet, so in Nietzsche it has found its philosopher. The deification of filth by the Parnassians with ink, paint, and clay; the censing among the Diabolists and Decadents of licentiousness, disease, and corruption; the glorification, by Ibsen, of the person who ‘wills,’ is ‘free’ and ‘wholly himself’—of all this Nietzsche supplies the theory, or something which proclaims itself as such. We may remark, in passing, that this has ever been the task of philosophy. It plays in the race the same rôle as consciousness in the individual. Consciousness has the thankless task of discovering rational and elucidatory grounds for the explanation of the impulses and acts springing up in subconsciousness. In the same way philosophy endeavours to find formulæ of apparent profundity for the peculiarities of feeling, thought and deed, having their roots in the history of politics and civilization—in climatic and economic conditions—and to fit them with a sort of uniform of logic. The race lives on, conformably with the historical necessity of its evolution, not troubling itself about a theory of its peculiarities; and philosophy hobbles busily after it, gathers with more or less regularity into its album the scattered features of racial character, and the manifestations of its health and disease; methodically provides this album with a title, paging, and full stop, then places it with a contented air in the library, among the systems of the same regulation size. Genuine truths, real, apposite explanations—these are not contained in philosophical systems. But they furnish instructive evidence of the efforts of the racial consciousness to supply reason, skilfully or clumsily, with the excuses it demands for the unconscious impulses of the race during a given period of time.
From the first to the last page of Nietzsche’s writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and invective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it, or curtly and rudely decrees, ‘That is false!’ (‘How much more rational is that ... theory, for example, represented by Herbert Spencer!... According to this theory, good is that which has hitherto always proved itself to be useful, so that it may be estimated as valuable in the highest degree, as valuable in itself. Although this mode of explanation is also false, the explanation itself is at least rational and psychologically tenable.’—Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2 Aufl., p. 5. ‘This mode of explanation is also false.’ Full-stop! Why is it false? Wherein is it false? Because Nietzsche so orders it. The reader has no right to inquire further.) For that matter, he himself contradicts almost every one of his violently dictatorial dogmas. He first asserts something and then its opposite, and both with equal vehemence, most frequently in the same book, often on the same page. Now and then he becomes conscious of the self-contradiction, and then he pretends to have been amusing himself and making sport of the reader. (‘It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati, among plain men who think and live otherwise—in other words, kromagati, or under the most favourable circumstances, among mandeigati, who “have the frog’s mode of progression”—I just do all I can to make myself hard to understand.... But with regard to the “good friends” ... it is well to accord them in advance room for the play and exercise of misconception; in this way one has still something to laugh at—or wholly to abolish these good friends—and still laugh!’—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 2 Aufl., p. 38. Similarly on p. 51: ‘All that is profound loves the mask; the most profound things even hate imagery and parable. Should not contrast rather be the right disguise in which the shamefacedness of a god might walk abroad?’)
The nature of the individual dogmatic assertions is very characteristic. First of all it is essential to become habituated to Nietzsche’s style. This is, I admit, unnecessary for the alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar. He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted) of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them, not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement of the author in an asylum. The unprofessional reader, on the contrary, is easily confused by the tumult of phrases. Once, however, he has found his way, once he has acquired some practice in discerning the actual theme among the drums-and-fifes of this ear-splitting, merry-go-round music, and, in the hailstorm of rattling words, that render clear vision almost impossible, has learned to perceive the fundamental thought, he at once observes that Nietzsche’s assertions are either commonplaces, tricked out like Indian caciques with feather-crown, nose-ring, and tattooing (and of so mean a kind that a high-school girl would be ashamed to make use of them in a composition-exercise); or bellowing insanity, rambling far beyond the range of rational examination and refutation. I will give only one or two examples of each kind among the thousands that exist:
Also sprach Zarathustra[371] (‘Thus spake Zoroaster’), 3 Theil, p. 9: ‘We halted just by a gateway. “See this gateway, dwarf”—I said again—“it has two faces. Two roads meet here; no one has yet travelled to their end. This long road behind—it lasts an eternity. And that long road in front—that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other; and it is here at this gateway that they meet. The name of the gateway is inscribed above, “Now.” But if one continues to follow one of them further, and ever further, and ever further, believest thou, dwarf, that these roads eternally contradict each other?”’
Blow away the lather from these phrases. What do they really say? The fleeting instant of the present is the point of contact of the past and the future. Can one call this self-evident fact a thought?
Also sprach Zarathustra, 4 Theil, p. 124 ff.: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day thinks it. Forbear! forbear! I am too pure for thee. Disturb me not! Has my world not become exactly perfect? My flesh is too pure for thy hands. Forbear, thou dull doltish and obtuse day! Is not the midnight clearer? The purest are to be lords of earth, the most unknown, the strongest, the souls of midnight, who are clearer and deeper than each day.... My sorrow, my happiness, are deep, thou strange day; but yet am I no God, no Hell of God: deep is their woe. God’s woe is deeper, thou strange World! Grasp at God’s woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre—a lyre of midnight, a singing frog, understood by none, but who must speak before the deaf, O higher men! For ye understand me not! Hence! hence! O youth! O mid-day! O midnight! Now came evening and night and midnight.... Ah! ah! how it sighs! how it laughs, how it rattles and gasps, the midnight! How soberly even she speaks, this poetess! Without doubt she has overdrunk her drunkenness! She became too wide awake! She chews the cud! She chews the cud of her woe in dream, the old deep midnight, and still more her joy. For joy, if woe be already deep: joy is deeper still than heart-pain.... Woe says, “Away! get thee gone, woe!... But joy wishes for a second coming, wishes all to be eternally like itself. Woe says, “Break, bleed, O heart! Wander, limb! Wing, fly! Onward! Upward! Pain!” Well, then! Cheer up! Oh, my old heart! Woe says, “Away!” Ye higher men ... should ye ever wish for one time twice, should ye ever say, “Thou pleasest me, happiness! Quick! instant! then would ye wish all back again! All anew, all eternally, all enchained, bound, amorous. Oh! then loved ye the world; ye eternities love it eternally and always; and to woe also speak ye: hence, but return! For all pleasure wishes—eternity. All pleasure wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for honey, for the lees, wishes for drunken midnight, tombs, the consolation of the tears of tombs, gilded twilight—what does pleasure not wish for! She is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more terrible, more secret than all woe; she wishes for herself, she gnaws into herself, the will of the ring struggles in her.... Pleasure wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for deep, deep eternity!’
And the sense of this crazy shower of whirling words? It is that men wish pain to cease and joy to endure! This the astounding discovery expounded by Nietzsche in this demented raving.
The following are obviously insane assertions or expressions: