What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.
I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across.
I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other shore.
You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth.
Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan & Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers, and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.”
Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the whole Prussian state machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms; when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his social thought for life.
I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern.
Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen a photograph of Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence.
Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as the Christian hermits and monks—and for the same reason, because he wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and history repeats itself—the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught! Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman—but he begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there.