The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by a small number of insane ideas, continually repeating themselves with exasperating monotony. We have already become acquainted with Nietzsche’s intellectual Sadism, and his mania of contradiction and doubt, or mania for questioning. In addition to these he evinces misanthropy, or anthropophobia, megalomania, and mysticism.
His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages: ‘Knowledge is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is communicated.’ ‘Every community leads somehow, somewhen, somewhere—to vulgarity.’ ‘There are still many void places for the lonesome and twosome [!] around which wafts the odour of tranquil seas.’ ‘Flee, my friend, into thy lonesomeness!’ ‘And many a one who turned away from life, only turned away from the rabble ... and many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only wished not to sit with filthy camel-drivers about the tank.’
His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous self-conceit; but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable; as a rule it displays a strong and even predominant union of mysticism and supernaturalism. It is pure self-conceit when he says: ‘In that which concerns my “Zarathustra,” I accept no one as a connoisseur whom each of his words has not at some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured; only then can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.’ Or when, after having criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with transparent allusion to himself: ‘But I, in my happiness and my “beyond,” pondered how soon the stronger becomes master of the strong.’ On the other hand, the hidden, mystic, primary idea of his megalomania already distinctly comes out in this passage: ‘But at some given time ... must he nevertheless come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving away out of all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality. It is only his immersion, interment, absorption [three synonyms for one concept!] into reality, in order that at some time if he again comes into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality.’
The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions ‘redeeming man’ and ‘redemption.’ He imagines himself a new Saviour, and plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance. Also Sprach Zarathustra is a complete stereotype of the sacred writings of Oriental nations. The book aims at an external resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It is divided into chapters and verses; the language is the archaic and prophetic language of the books of Revelation (‘And Zarathustra looked at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said thus:’); there frequently appear long enumerations and sermons like litanies (‘I love those who do not seek a reason only behind the stars ...; I love him who lives to know ...; I love him who labours and invents ...; I love him who loves his virtue ...; I love him who withholds for himself not one drop of mind,’ etc.), and individual paragraphs point verbatim to analogous portions of the Gospel, e.g.: ‘When Zarathustra had taken leave of the city ... there followed him many who called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus they came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto them, that thenceforth he would go alone.’ ‘And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed by tears and consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.’ ‘Verily, said he to his disciples, yet a little and there comes this long twilight. Ah! how shall I save my light?’ ‘In this manner did Zarathustra go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food or drink.... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep sleep. And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,’ etc. Many of the chapters have most expressive titles: ‘On Self-Conquest;’ ‘On Immaculate Knowledge;’ ‘On Great Events;’ ‘On the Redemption;’ ‘On the Mount of Olives;’ ‘On Apostates;’ ‘The Cry of Sore Need;’ ‘The Last Supper;’ ‘The Awakening,’ etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls him to say, atheistically: ‘If there were gods, how could I endure to be no god? Hence’ (italics his) ‘there are no gods;’ but such passages vanish among the countless ones in which he refers to himself as a god. ‘Thou hast the power and thou wilt not reign.’ ‘He who is of my nature escapes not such an hour—the hour which says to him: Only now art thou going the way of thy greatness.... Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; that which has hitherto been thy last danger has now become thy last resource. Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; now must thy best courage be, that there is no longer any way behind thee. Thou art going on the way of thy greatness; here shall no one slink behind thee,’ etc.
Nietzsche’s mysticism and megalomania manifest themselves not only in his somewhat more coherent thought, but also in his general mode of expression. The mystic numbers, three and seven, frequently appear. He sees the external world, as he does himself—vast, distant, deep; and the words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page, almost in every line: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering....’ ‘The South is a great school of healing.’ ‘These last great searchers....’ ‘With the signs of great destiny.’ ‘Where together with great compassion he has learnt great contempt—to learn, at their side, great reverence.’ ‘Guilt is all great existence.’ ‘That I may celebrate the great noon with you.’ ‘Thus speaks all great love.’ ‘Not from you is great weariness to come to me.’ ‘Men who are nothing but a great eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something great....’ ‘To love with great love, to love with great contempt.’ ‘But thou, O depth, thou sufferest too deeply.’ ‘Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with floating enigmas and laughters.’ (It is to be observed how, in this sentence, all the obsessions of the maniac crowd together—depth, brilliancy, mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) ‘All depth shall ascend to my height.’ ‘They do not think enough into the deep,’ etc. With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs with equal constancy. The words ‘abyss’ and ‘abysmal’ are among the most frequent in Nietzsche’s writings. His words which have the prefix ‘over’ are associated with his motor images, especially those of flying and hovering: ‘Over-moral sense’; ‘over-European music’; ‘climbing monkeys and over-heated’; ‘from the species to the over-species’; ‘the over-hero’; ‘the over-human’; ‘the over-dragon’; ‘the over-urgent’ and ‘over-compassionate,’ etc.
As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of his diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes to the furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his insanity: ‘That true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained mentality, running presto.... They regard thought as something slow, hesitant, almost a toil; not at all as something light, divine, and nearest of kin to the dance, to exuberance.’ ‘The bold, light, tender march and flight of his thought.’ ‘We think too rapidly.... It is as if we carried about in our head an incessantly rolling machine.’ ‘It is in impatient spirits that there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity, because insanity has so joyous a tempo.’ ‘All talking runs too slowly for me; I leap into thy chariot, Storm!... Like a cry and a huzza would I glide away over vast seas.’ ‘Eruptive insanity forever hovers above humanity as its greatest danger.’ (He is, of course, thinking of himself when speaking of ‘humanity.’) ‘In these days it sometimes happens that a gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly frenzied, breaks plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends everyone, and finally retires in shame and anger against himself.’ (Most decidedly ‘that sometimes happens,’ not only ‘in these days,’ but in all times; but among maniacs only.) ‘Where is the insanity with which ye were forced to be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is ... this insanity.’ ‘All things are worth the same; each is alike. He who feels otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.’ ‘I put this exuberance and this foolishness in the place of that will, as I taught; in all one thing is impossible—reasonableness.’ ‘My hand is a fool’s hand; woe to all tables and walls, and wherever there is yet room for the embellishments of fools—scribbling of fools!’ (In the original there is here a play on the words Zierrath, Schmierrath.)[426] He also, in the manner of maniacs, excuses his mental disease: ‘Finally, there would remain open the great question whether we could dispense with disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially if our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the sick soul as much as the healthy soul.’
Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his ‘primæval health.’ His soul is ‘always clearer and always healthier’; ‘we Argonauts of the ideal’ are ‘healthier than one would fain allow us to be—dangerously healthy, more and more healthy,’ etc.
The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the special colour, form, and content of Nietzsche’s thought, originating in illusions of sense; and this unhappy lunatic has been earnestly treated as a ‘philosopher,’ and his drivel put forward as a ‘system’—this man whose scribbling is one single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out from every line! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by profession, and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a newspaper article on Nietzsche’s book, Der Fall Wagner, lays great stress on the fact that ‘it superabounds, as it were, in intellectual health.’ Ordinary university professors—such as G. Adler, in Freiburg, and others—extol Nietzsche as a ‘bold and original thinker,’ and with solemn seriousness take up a position in respect of his ‘philosophy’—some with avowed enthusiasm, and some with carefully considered reservations! In the face of such incurably deep mental obtuseness, it cannot excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy portion of the young spirits of the present generation should, with hasty generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt deserved by its officially-appointed teachers. These teachers undertake to introduce their students into mental philosophy, and are yet without the capacity to distinguish from rational thought the incoherent fugitive ideation of a maniac.
Dr. Hermann Türck[427] characterizes in excellent words the disciples of Nietzsche: ‘This piece of wisdom [‘nothing is true; all is permissible’] in the mouth of a morally insane man of letters has ... found ready response among persons who, in consequence of a moral defect, feel themselves to be in contradiction to the demands of society. This aforesaid intellectual proletariat of large towns is especially jubilant over the new magnificent discovery that all morality and all truth are completely superfluous and pernicious to the development of the individual. It is true that these persons have always in secret said to themselves, “Nothing is true—all is permissible,” and have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly. But now they can avow it openly, and with pride; for Friedrich Nietzsche, the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted truth of life.... It is not society which is right in its estimation of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no! The individuals who follow their egoistical personal aims only—who act only as if truth were of consequence to them—they, the counterfeiters of truth, those unscrupulous penny-a-liners, lying critics, literary thieves, and manufacturers of pseudo-realistic brummagem—they are the true heroes, the masters of the situation, the truly free spirits.’
That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt, the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides these gallows birds without the courage and strength for criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow themselves to be stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by others, who must be judged otherwise and in part more gently. In fact, Nietzsche’s ranting includes some ideas which, in part, respond to a widespread notion of the age, and in part are capable of awakening the deception that, in spite of all the exaggeration and insane distortion of exposition, they contain a germ of truth and right; and these ideas explain why many persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached with lack of clearness and critical capacity.