Degeneration

by Max Simon Nordau

Now with regard to the historical assertion. At first the morality of masters is supposed to have prevailed, in which every selfish act of violence seemed good, every sort of unselfishness bad. The inverted valuation of deeds and feelings is said to have been the work of a slave-revolt. The Jews are said to have discovered ‘ascetic morality,’ i.e., the ideal of combating all desires, contempt of all pleasures of the flesh, pity, and brotherly love, in order to avenge themselves on their oppressors, the masters—the ‘blond beasts of prey.’ I have shown above, the insanity of this idea of a conscious and purposed act of vengeance on the part of the Jewish people. But is it, then, true that our present morality, with its conceptions of good and evil, is an invention of the Jews, directed against ‘blond beasts,’ an enterprise of slaves against a master-people? The leading doctrines of the present morality, falsely termed Christian, were expressed in Buddhism six hundred years prior to the rise of Christianity. Buddha preached them, himself no slave, but a king’s son, and they were the moral doctrines, not of slaves, not of the oppressed, but of the very masterfolk themselves, of the Brahmans, of the proper Aryans. The following are some of the Buddhist moral doctrines, extracted from the Hindu Dhammapada[376] and from the Chinese Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king:[377] ‘Do not speak harshly to anybody’ (Dhammapada, verse 133). ‘Let us live happily then, not hating those who hate us! Among men who hate us let us dwell free from hatred’ (verse 197). ‘Because he has pity on all living creatures, therefore is a man called Ariya’ (elect) (verse 270). ‘Be not thoughtless, watch your thoughts!’ (verse 327). ‘Good is restraint in all things’ (verse 361). ‘Him I call indeed a Brâhmana who, though he has committed no offence, endures reproach, bonds, and stripes’ (verse 399). ‘Be kind to all that lives’ (Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, verse 2,024). ‘Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity; conquer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow’ (verse 2,241). Is that a morality of slaves or of masters? Is it a notion of roving beasts of prey, or that of compassionate, unselfish, social human beings? And this notion did not spring up in Palestine, but in India, among the very people of the conquering Aryans, who were ruling a subordinate race; and in China, where at that time no conquering race held another in subjection. Self-sacrifice for others, pity and sympathy, are supposed to be the morality of Jewish slaves. Was the heroic baboon mentioned by Darwin,[378] after Brehm, a Jewish slave in revolt against the masterfolk of blond beasts?

In the ‘blond beast’ Nietzsche evidently is thinking of the ancient Germans of the migratory ages. They have inspired in him the idea of the roving beast of prey, falling upon weaker men for the voluptuous assuaging of their instincts of bloodthirstiness and destruction. This beast of prey never entered into contracts. ‘He who comes on the scene violent in deed and demeanour ... what has he to do with contracts?’[379] Very well; history teaches that the ‘blond beast,’ i.e., the ancient German of the migratory ages, not yet affected by the ‘slave-revolt in morals,’ was a vigorous but peace-loving peasant, who made war not to riot in murder, but to obtain arable land, and who always first sought to conclude peaceful treaties before necessity forced him to have recourse to the sword.[380] And long before intelligence of the ‘ascetic ideal’ of Jewish Christianity reached it, the same ‘blond beast’ developed the conception of feudal fidelity, i.e., the notion that it is most glorious for a man to divest himself of his own ‘I’; to know honour only as the resplendence of another’s honour, of whom one has become the ‘man’; and to sacrifice his life for the chief!

Conscience is supposed to be ‘cruelty introverted.’ As the man to whom it is an irrepressible want to inflict pain, to torture, and to rend, cannot assuage this want on others, he satisfies it on himself.[381]

If this were true, then the respectable, the virtuous man, who had never satisfied the pretended primeval instinct of causing pain by means of a crime against others, would be forced to rage the most violently against himself, and would therefore of necessity have the worst conscience. Conversely, the criminal directing his fundamental instinct outwardly, and hence having no need to seek satisfaction in self-rending, would necessarily live in the most delightful peace with his conscience. Does this agree with observation? Has a righteous man who has not given way to the instinct of cruelty ever been seen to suffer from the stings of conscience? Are these not, on the contrary, to be observed in the very persons who have yielded to their instinct, who have been cruel to others, and hence have attained to that satisfaction of their craving, vouchsafed them, according to Nietzsche, by the evil conscience? Nietzsche says,[382] ‘It is precisely among criminals and offenders that remorse is extremely rare; prisons and reformatories are not the brooding places in which this species of worm loves to thrive,’ and believes that in this remark he has given a proof of his assertion. But by the commission of crime prisoners have shown that in them the instinct of evil is developed in special strength; in the prison they are forcibly prevented from giving way to their instinct; it is, therefore, precisely in them that self-rending through remorse ought to be extraordinarily violent, and yet among them ‘the prick of conscience is extremely rare.’ It is evident that Nietzsche’s idea is nothing but a delirious sally, and not worthy for a moment to be weighed seriously against the explanation of conscience proposed by Darwin, and accepted by all moral philosophers.[383]

Now for the philological argument. Originally, bonus is supposed to have read duonus, and hence signified ‘man of discord, disunion (duo), warrior.’[384] The proof of the ancient form duonus is offered by ‘bellum = duellum = duen-lum.’ Now duen-lum is never met with, but is a free invention of Nietzsche, as is equally duonus. How admirable is this method! He invents a word duonus which does not exist, and bases it on the word duen-lum, which is just as non-existent and equally drawn from imagination. The philology here displayed by Nietzsche is on a level with that which has created the beautiful and convincing series of derivations alopex = lopex = pexpix = pux = fechs = fichs = Fuchs (fox). Nietzsche is uncommonly proud of his discovery, that the conception of Schuld (guilt) is derived from the very narrow and material conception of Schulden (debts).[385] Even if we admit the accuracy of this derivation, what has his theory gained by it? This would only prove that, in the course of time, the crudely material and limited conception had become enlarged, deepened, and spiritualized. To whom has it ever occurred to contest this fact? What dabbler in the history of civilization does not know that conceptions develop themselves? Did love and friendship, as primitively understood, ever convey the idea of the delicate and manifold states of mind now expressed by these words? It is possible that the first guilt of which men were conscious was the duty of restoring a loan. But neither can guilt, in the sense of a material obligation, arise amongst ‘blond brutes,’ or ‘cruel beasts of prey.’ It already presupposes a relation of contract, the recognition of a right of possession, respect for other individuals. It is not possible if there does not exist, on the part of the lender, the disposition to be agreeable to a fellow-creature, and a trust in the readiness of the latter to requite the benefit; and, on the part of the borrower, a voluntary submission to the disagreeable necessity of repayment. And all these feelings are really already morality—a simple, but true, morality—the real ‘slave-morality’ of duty, consideration, sympathy, self-constraint; not the ‘master-morality’ of selfishness, cruel violence, unbounded desires! Even if single words like the German schlecht (schlicht) (bad, plain, or straight) have to-day a meaning the opposite of their original one, this is not to be explained by a fabulous ‘transvaluation of values,’ but, naturally and obviously, by Abel’s theory of the ‘contrary double-meaning of primitive words.’ The same sound originally served to designate the two opposites of the same concept, appearing, in agreement with the law of association, simultaneously in consciousness, and it was only in the later life of language that the word became the exclusive vehicle of one or other of the contrary concepts. This phenomenon has not the remotest connection with a change in the moral valuation of feelings and acts.

Now the biological argument. The prevailing morality is supposed to be admittedly of a character tending to improve the chances of life in gregarious animals, but to be an obstacle to the cultivation of the highest human type, and hence pernicious to humanity as a whole, as it prevents the race from rising to the most perfect culture, and the attainment of its possible ideal. Hence the most perfect human type would, according to Nietzsche, be the ‘magnificent beast of prey,’ the ‘laughing lion,’ able to satisfy all his desires without consideration for good or evil. Observation teaches that this doctrine is rank idiocy. All ‘over-men’ known to history, who gave the reins to their instincts, were either diseased from the outset, or became diseased. Famous criminals—and Nietzsche expressly ranks these among the ‘over-men’[386]—have displayed, almost without exception, the bodily and mental stigmata characterizing them as degenerates, and hence as cripples or atavistic phenomena, not as specimens of the highest evolution and florescence. The Cæsars, whose monstrous selfishness could batten on all humanity, succumbed to madness, which it will hardly be wished to designate as an ideal condition. Nietzsche readily admits that the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to the species, that he destroys and ravages; but of what consequence is the species? It exists for the sole purpose of making possible the perfect development of individual ‘over-men,’ and of satisfying their most extravagant needs.[387] But the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to itself; it rages against itself, it even annihilates itself, and yet that cannot possibly be a useful result of highly-trained qualities. The biological truth is, that constant self-restraint is a necessity of existence as much for the strongest as for the weakest. It is the activity of the highest human cerebral centres. If these are not exercised they waste away, i.e., man ceases to be man, the pretended ‘over-man’ becomes sub-human—in other words, a beast. By the relaxation or breaking up of the mechanism of inhibition in the brain the organism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent parts, and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, to disease, madness and death, even if no resistance results from the external world against the frenzied egoism of the unbridled individual.

What now remains standing of Nietzsche’s entire system? We have recognised it as a collection of crazy and inflated phrases, which it is really impossible seriously to seize, since they possess hardly the solidity of the smoke-rings from a cigar. Nietzsche’s disciples are for ever murmuring about the ‘depth’ of his moral philosophy, and with himself the words ‘deep’ and ‘depth’ are a mental trick repeated so constantly as to be insufferable.[388] If we draw near to this ‘depth’ for the purpose of fathoming it, we can hardly trust our eyes. Nietzsche has not thought out one of his so-called ideas. Not one of his wild assertions is carried a finger’s-breadth beneath the uppermost surface, so that, at least, it might withstand the faintest puff of breath. It is probable that the entire history of philosophy does not record a second instance of a man having the impudence to give out as philosophy, and even as profound philosophy, such railway-bookstall humour and such tea-table wit. Nietzsche sees absolutely nothing of the moral problem, around which, nevertheless, he has poured out ten volumes of talk. Rationally treated, this problem can only run thus: Can human actions be divided into good and evil? Why should some be good, the others evil? What is to constrain men to perform the good and refrain from the evil?

Nietzsche would seem to deny the legitimacy of a classification of actions from moral standpoints. ‘Nothing is true, all is permissible.’[389] There is no good and no evil. It is a superstition and hereditary prejudice to cling to these artificial notions. He himself stands ‘beyond good and evil,’ and he invites the ‘free spirits’ and ‘good Europeans’ to follow him to this standpoint. And thereupon this ‘free spirit,’ standing ‘beyond good and evil,’ speaks with the greatest candour of the ‘aristocratic virtues,’[390] and of the ‘morality of the masters.’ Are there, then, virtues? Is there, then, a morality, even if it be opposed to the prevailing one? How is that compatible with the negation of all morality? Are men’s actions, therefore, not of equal value? Is it possible in these to distinguish good and evil? Does Nietzsche, therefore, undertake to classify them, designating some as virtues—‘aristocratic virtues’—others as ‘slave actions,’ bad for the ‘masters, the commanders,’ and hence wicked; how, then, can he still affirm that he stands ‘beyond good and evil’? He stands, in fact, mid-way between good and evil, only he indulges in the foolish jest of calling that evil which we call good, and vice-versâ—an intellectual performance of which every naughty and mischievous child of four is certainly capable.

This first and astounding non-comprehension of his own standpoint is already a good example of his ‘depth.’ But further. As the chief proof of the non-existence of morality, he adduces what he calls the ‘transvaluation of values.’ At one time good is said to have been that which is now esteemed evil, and conversely. We have seen that this idea is delirious, and expressed in a delirious way.[391] But let it be granted that Nietzsche is right; we will for once enter into the folly and accept the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’ as a fact. What has his fundamental idea gained by this? A ‘transvaluation of values’ would prove nothing against the existence of a morality, for it leaves the concept of value itself absolutely intact. These, then, are values; but now this, now that, species of action acquires the rank of value. No historian of civilization denies the fact that the notions concerning what is moral or immoral have changed in the course of history, that they continually change, that they will change in the future. The recognition of this has become a commonplace. If Nietzsche assumes this to be a discovery of his own, he deserves to be decked with a fool’s cap by the assistant teacher of a village school. But how can the evolution, the transformation, of moral concepts in any way contradict the fundamental fact of the existence of moral concepts? Not only does this transformation not contradict these, but it confirms them! They are the necessary premise of this transformation! A modification of moral concepts is evidently possible only if there are moral concepts; but this is exactly the problem—‘are there moral concepts?’ In spite of all his spouting about the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality,’ Nietzsche never approaches this primary and all-important question.