“Encheiresin naturae nennt's die Chemie,
Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie.”[(23)]
Nietzsche's realism, by contrast, goes to the very quick of nature, grasps all the gifts of life, and from the continuous flood of phenomena extracts a rich, full-flavored essence. It is from a sense of gratitude for this boon that he becomes an idolatrous worshiper of experience, “der grosse Jasager,”—the great sayer of Yes,—and the most stimulating optimist of all ages. To Nietzsche reality is alive as perhaps never to man before. He plunges down to the very heart of things, absorbs their vital qualities and meanings, and having himself learned to draw supreme satisfaction from the most ordinary facts and events, he makes the common marvelous to others, which, as was said by James Russell Lowell, is a true test of genius. No wonder that deification of reality becomes the dominant motif in his philosophy. But again that onesided aristocratic strain perverts his ethics. To drain the intoxicating cup at the feast of life, such is the divine privilege not of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. They must not let this or that petty and artificial convention, nor yet this or that moral command or prohibition, restrain them from the exercise of that higher sense of living, but must fully abandon themselves to its joys. “Since man came into existence he hath had too little joy. That alone, my brethren, is our original sin.”[(24)] The “much-too-many” are doomed to inanity by their lack of appetite at the banquet of life:
Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite: “All is vanity!”
But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain art! Break, break the tables of those who are never joyful![(25)]
The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the remote felicities of any problematic future state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be understood by any means as a banal devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting or crushing, the factors of supreme spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in experience, the Will to Live encompasses jointly the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said that since man owes some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The unmistakable sign of heroism is amor fati, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it may.
Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a capacious aptitude for suffering. “Ye would perchance abolish suffering,” exclaims Nietzsche, “and we,—it seems that we would rather have it even greater and worse than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering,—tragical suffering,—know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought about every elevation of man?” “Spirit is that life which cutteth into life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge increaseth;—knew ye that before? And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and consecrated by tears as a sacrificial animal;—knew ye that before?” And if, then, the tragical pain inherent in life be no argument against Joyfulness, the zest of living can be obscured by nothing save the fear of total extinction. To the disciple of Nietzsche, by whom every moment of his existence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of his irrevocable separation from all things is unbearable. “‘Was this life?’ I shall say to Death. ‘Well, then, once more!’” And—to paraphrase Nietzsche's own simile—the insatiable witness of the great tragi-comedy, spectator and participant at once, being loath to leave the theatre, and eager for a repetition of the performance, shouts his endless encore, praying fervently that in the constant repetition of the performance not a single detail of the action be omitted. The yearning for the endlessness not of life at large, not of life on any terms, but of this my life with its ineffable wealth of rapturous moments, works up the extreme optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous a priori notion of infinity, expressed in the name die ewige Wiederkehr (“Eternal Recurrence”). It is a staggeringly imaginative concept, formed apart from any evidential grounds, and yet fortified with a fair amount of logical armament. The universe is imagined as endless in time, although its material contents are not equally conceived as limitless. Since, consequently, there must be a limit to the possible variety in the arrangement and sequence of the sum total of data, even as in the case of a kaleidoscope, the possibility of variegations is not infinite. The particular co-ordination of things in the universe, say at this particular moment, is bound to recur again and again in the passing of the eons. But under the nexus of cause and effect the resurgence of the past from the ocean of time is not accidental nor is the configuration of things haphazard, as is true in the case of the kaleidoscope; rather, history, in the most inclusive acceptation of the term, is predestined to repeat itself; this happens through the perpetual progressive resurrection of its particles. It is then to be assumed that any aspect which the world has ever presented must have existed innumerable millions of times before, and must recur with eternal periodicity. That the deterministic strain in this tremendous Vorstellung of a cyclic rhythm throbbing in the universe entangles its author's fanatical belief in evolution in a rather serious self-contradiction, does not detract from its spiritual lure, nor from its wide suggestiveness, however incapable it may be of scientific demonstration.
From unfathomed depths of feeling wells up the pæan of the prophet of the life intense.
O Mensch! Gib Acht!
Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
Ich schlief, ich schlief—,