Hence Nietzsche lunged against status quo. He did what he himself called “unzeitmässig,” untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time—more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how man fared in this culture—the question as to what man got out of it and as to what it got out of man.
Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of “happiness” at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian “happiness morality”: “I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my work.”
No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a “culture of the earth, or of man?” Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, man must be the decisive thing; man must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, et id omne genus, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for “culture,” but culture for man; of man, by man, for man.
Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero’s warning: “Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay.” But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe’s “flat country”—flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling—up to an appreciation of the potential—not the actual—greatness of man’s life. Greatness is not yet man’s verity but his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man’s strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say I will is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this I will. To produce men who can say I will is at once the task and the test of culture. This I will is the climax and goal of man. In this I will vanishes every fearsome and disquieting I must, every compulsion of outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been written or thought or done. “And thou, O lord, art more than they!” Thou—thou alone—art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable. “Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!”
But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men, personality-men! Such men are not Gegenwartsmenschen, present day men, but Zukunftsmenschen, future day men; not reality but task—our task. That future man will surpass present man as much as present man surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man, shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.
This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied—vainly we may now hope—in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.
This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.
We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?
Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not Vaterland, but Kinderland, must be our concern. Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.
All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.—Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.