His disciples believe in this brag, and, with upturned eyes, bleat it after him in sheep-like chorus. The profound ignorance of this flock of ruminants permits them, forsooth, to believe in Nietzsche’s originality. As they have never learnt, read, or thought about, anything, all that they pick up in bars, or in their loafings, is naturally new and hitherto non-existent. Anyone, however, who regards Nietzsche relatively to analogous phenomena of the age, will recognise that his pretended originalities and temerities are the greasiest commonplaces, such as a decent self-respecting thinker would not touch with a pair of tongs.
Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original. On such occasions his expressions contain no sense at all, not even nonsense; hence it is impossible to unite them with anything previously thought or said. When, on the contrary, there is a shimmer of reason in his words, we at once recognise them as having their origin in the paradoxes or platitudes of others. Nietzsche’s ‘individualism’ is an exact reproduction of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years ago exaggerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating the importance—even the grossly empirical importance—of the ‘I’; whom, even in his own day, no one took seriously, and who since then had fallen into well-merited profound oblivion, from which at the present time a few anarchists and philosophical ‘fops’—for the hysteria of the time has created such beings—seek to disinter him.[405] Where Nietzsche extols the ‘I,’ its rights, its claims, the necessity of cultivating and developing it, the reader who has in mind the preceding chapters of this book will recognise the phrases of Barrès, Wilde, and Ibsen. His philosophy of will is appropriated from Schopenhauer, who throughout has directed his thought and given colour to his language. The complete similarity of his phrases concerning will with Schopenhauer’s theory has evidently penetrated to his own consciousness and made him uncomfortable; for, in order to obliterate it, he has placed a false nose of his own invention on the cast he has made, viz., he contests the fact that the motive force in every being is the desire for self-preservation; in his view it is rather the desire for power. This addition is pure child’s play. In the lower orders of living beings it is never a ‘desire for power,’ but always only a desire for self-preservation, that is perceptible; and among men this seeming ‘desire for power’ can, by anyone but the ‘deep’ Nietzsche, be traced to two well-known roots—either to the effort to make all organs act to the limit of their functional capacity, which is connected with feelings of pleasure, or to procure for themselves advantages ameliorative of the conditions of existence. But the effort towards feelings of pleasure and better conditions of existence is nothing but a form of the phenomenon of the desire for existence, and he who regards the ‘desire for power’ as anything different from, and even opposed to, the desire for existence, simply gives evidence of his incapacity to pursue this idea of the desire for existence any distance beyond the length of his nose. Nietzsche’s chief proof of the difference between the desire for power and the desire for existence is that the former often drives the desirer to the contemning and endangering, even to the destruction, of his own life. But in that case the whole struggle for existence, in which dangers are continually incurred, and for that matter are often enough sought, would also be a proof that the struggler did not desire his existence! Nietzsche would, indeed, be quite capable of asserting this also.
The degenerates with whom we have become acquainted affirm that they do not trouble themselves concerning Nature and its laws. Nietzsche is not so far advanced in self-sufficiency as Rossetti, to whom it was a matter of indifference whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around the earth. He openly avows that this is not a matter of indifference to him; he regrets it; it troubles him, that the earth is no longer the central point of the universe, and be the chief thing on the earth. ‘Since Copernicus, man seems to have fallen upon an inclined plane; he is now rolling ever faster away from the central point—whither?—into the nothing? into the piercing feeling of his nothingness?’ He is very angry with Copernicus concerning this. Not only with Copernicus, but with science in general. ‘All science is at present busied in talking man out of the self-respect he has hitherto possessed, just as if this had been nothing but a bizarre self-conceit’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 173). Is this not an echo of the words of Oscar Wilde, who complains that Nature ‘is so indifferent’ to him, ‘so unappreciative,’ and that he ‘is no more to Nature than the cattle that browse on the slope’?
In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and Decadents. The passage in Zur Genealogie der Moral (p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be in the chapter in Wilde’s Intentions on ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as, conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms: ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is ‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s good’ (Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde, Intentions, p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’ A Rebours, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.
Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are the irrefutable errors of man’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ‘The will for truth—that might be a hidden will for death’ (Ibid., p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it, as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy! The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been also drawn up by him,[406] it is true with less blowing of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, with such swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 39): ‘I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.
Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and the cool,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (Ibid., p. 177). ‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a newspaper’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words they make newspapers!’ (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader of sound taste go wild.
Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This ‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed against doors that stand open. This ‘solitary one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy sheep.
Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’ philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at length:
‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy, and clever—ay, precocious [!]—little book, in which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the truly English kind, and which attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book was Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger [“The Origin of Moral Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliches—“Things Human, Things all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not refuting them—what have I to do with refutations?—but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).
This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does not ‘refute’—he would not have found that so easy, either—but that ‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’