Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner) and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant) political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy” became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics as the basis of thought about the world—hence the importance of Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher, neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts, judgments and thought-structures comprised in the living phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most telltale trait of personality, a thing-become, mirrored over from soul into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the immediate-living into the dimensional-logical; and on that very account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration. The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity. Each epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives (apart from actual practitioners) are the dramatists. They are the real philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of philosophy is or what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question: In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question is put in no ironic spirit. Shaw is the one thinker of eminence who has consistently advanced in the same direction as that of the true Nietzsche—namely, productive criticism of the Western morale—while following out as poet the last implications of Ibsen and devoting the balance of the artistic creativeness that is in him to practical discussions.
Save in so far as the belated Romanticist in him has determined the style, sound and attitude of his philosophy, Nietzsche is in every respect a disciple of the materialistic decades. That which drew him with such passion to Schopenhauer was (not that he himself or anyone else was conscious of it) that element of Schopenhauer’s doctrine by which he destroyed the great metaphysic and (without meaning to do so) parodied his master Kant; that is to say, the modification of all deep ideas of the Baroque age into tangible and mechanistic notions. Kant speaks in inadequate words, which hide a mighty and scarcely apprehensible intuition, an intuition of the world as appearance or phenomenon. In Schopenhauer this becomes the world as brain-phenomenon (Gehirnphänomen). The change-over from tragic philosophy to philosophical plebeianism is complete. It will be enough to cite one passage. In “The World as Will and Idea” Schopenhauer says: “The will, as thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true and indestructible essence of the man; in itself, however, it is without consciousness. For the consciousness is conditioned by the intellect and this is a mere accident of our being, since it is a function of the brain, and that again (with its dependent nerves and spinal cord) is a mere fruit, a product, nay, even a parasite of the rest of the organism, inasmuch as it does not intervene directly in the latter’s activities but only serves a purpose of self-preservation by regulating its relations with the outer world.” Here we have exactly the fundamental position of the flattest materialism. It was not for nothing that Schopenhauer, like Rousseau before him, studied the English sensualists. From them he learned to misread Kant in the spirit of megalopolitan utilitarian modernity. The intellect as instrument of the will-to-life,[[459]] as weapon in the struggle for existence, the ideas brought to grotesque expression by Shaw in “Man and Superman”—it was because this was his view of the world that Schopenhauer became the fashionable philosopher when Darwin’s main work was published in 1859. In contrast to Schelling, Hegel and Fichte, he was a philosopher, and the only philosopher, whose metaphysical propositions could be absorbed with ease by intellectual mediocrity. The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness, he presented the civilized view of the world complete and assimilable. His system is anticipated Darwinism, and the speech of Kant and the concepts of the Indians are simply clothing. In his book “Ueber den Willen in der Natur” (1835) we find already the struggle for self-preservation in Nature, the human intellect as master-weapon in that struggle and sexual love as unconscious selection according to biological interest.[[460]]
It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with irresistible success in the field of zoology. The economic origin of Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms.[[461]] Proof, to the Darwinian, means to the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they conform to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of “Evolution.” Darwinism—that is to say, that totality of very varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the application of the causality principle to living things, which therefore is a method and not a result—was known in all details to the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the “Manchester School” system, and it is this latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity.
The spiritual unity of the century is manifest enough here. From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone (including even those who, like Hebbel, knew nothing of Darwin) is a derivative of the evolution-idea—and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that—whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle’s timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the a priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant “Progress.” Darwin’s struggle for existence, which he read into Nature and not out of it, is only the plebeian form of that primary feeling which in Shakespeare’s tragedies moves the great realities against one another; but what Shakespeare inwardly saw, felt and actualized in his figures as destiny, Darwinism comprehends as causal connexion and formulates as a superficial system of utilities. And it is this system and not this primary feeling that is the basis of the utterances of “Zarathustra,” the tragedy of “Ghosts,” the problems of the “Ring of the Nibelungs.” Only, it was with terror that Schopenhauer, the first of his line, perceived what his own knowledge meant—that is the root of his pessimism, and the “Tristan” music of his adherent Wagner is its highest expression—whereas the late men, and foremost among them Nietzsche, face it with enthusiasm, though it is true, the enthusiasm is sometimes rather forced.
Nietzsche’s breach with Wagner—that last product of the German spirit over which greatness broods—marks his silent change of school-allegiance, his unconscious step from Schopenhauer to Darwin, from the metaphysical to the physiological formulation of the same world-feeling, from the denial to the affirmation of the aspect that in fact is common to both, the one seeing as will-to-life what the other regards as struggle for existence. In his “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” he still means by evolution an inner ripening, but the Superman is the product of evolution as machinery. And “Zarathustra” is ethically the outcome of an unconscious protest against “Parsifal”—which artistically entirely governs it—of the rivalry of one evangelist for another.
But Nietzsche was also a Socialist without knowing it. Not his catchwords, but his instincts, were Socialistic, practical, directed to that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a thought upon. Materialism, Socialism and Darwinism are only artificially and on the surface separable. It was this that made it possible for Shaw in the third act of “Man and Superman” (one of the most important and significant of the works that issued from the transition) to obtain, by giving just a small and indeed perfectly logical turn to the tendencies of “master-morale” and the production of the Superman, the specific maxims of his own Socialism. Here Shaw was only expressing with remorseless clarity and full consciousness of the commonplace, what the uncompleted portion of the Zarathustra would have said with Wagnerian theatricality and woolly romanticism. All that we are concerned to discover in Nietzsche’s reasoning is its practical bases and consequences, which proceed of necessity from the structure of modern public life. He moves amongst vague ideas like “new values,” “Superman,” “Sinn der Erde,” and declines or fears to shape them more precisely. Shaw does it. Nietzsche observes that the Darwinian idea of the Superman evokes the notion of breeding, and stops there, leaves it at a sounding phrase. Shaw pursues the question—for there is no object in talking about it if nothing is going to be done about it—asks how it is to be achieved, and from that comes to demand the transformation of mankind into a stud-farm. But this is merely the conclusion implicit in the Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was not bold enough, or was too fastidious, to draw. If we do talk of systematic breeding—a completely materialistic and utilitarian notion—we must be prepared to answer the questions, who shall breed what, where and how? But Nietzsche, too romantic to face the very prosaic social consequences and to expose poetic ideas to the test of facts, omits to say that his whole doctrine, as a derivative of Darwinism, presupposes Socialism and, moreover, socialistic compulsion as the means; that any systematic breeding of a class of higher men requires as condition precedent a strictly socialistic ordering of society; and that this “Dionysiac” idea, as it involves a common action and is not simply the private affair of detached thinkers, is democratic, turn it how you may. It is the climax of the ethical force of “Thou shalt”; to impose upon the world the form of his will, Faustian man sacrifices even himself.