Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere, was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this modern yearning for Nirvana,—i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but psychological desirelessness,—was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer; No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche called Schopenhauer his teacher—went forth as an enthusiastic apostle of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the infinite negation of life.
And surely the anguish of Nietzsche fitted him, as no other, to be partner in distress of this anguished god. Surely he, if anyone, could say, To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world, to bear witness—to the body of this death. From his mother’s womb was he set apart to suffer. Endowed with a transcendent and super-abundant fulness of spirit, every fresh and forceful impulse of his personality he felt as an indictment of the inexorable pitiless limitations within which his best innermost life was imprisoned. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, not only to men, but to himself. Each new flash of light which illumined his inner eye let him see the graves upon which he was treading, and revealed those who claimed to be alive in the mask of the death to which they had succumbed. In the abounding wealth of youth he felt a mortal sickness getting its grip upon him. As life dragged on, he felt more and more the hell tortures of pain from which he had to wring his work every hour of his existence.
Who would have the effrontery to cast a stone at this man had he flung down his arms into one of those graves, and cried with an old philosopher: This may all be very well for the gods, but not for me! But he did not lay down his arms! Freed from all encumbrances of conscience and debilitating sense of sin which had paralyzed the Christian, and from the Schopenhauer Welt- und Lebenanschauung, he welcomed all that life had to offer and went unhesitatingly toward the universal goal of annihilation with a blithe and unregretting spirit. Entertaining no illusions about indeterminism or free-will or immortality, he rejoiced in his strength, seized with avidity the passing moment, and fell fighting to the last. He spoke his courageous “Yes!” to life, while Schopenhauer, with his money and his mistress, and all the world beside, were crying to him to say “No!” For this we must thank him. In this we find an antidote to present-day tendencies to sink the individual in the multitude, to subordinate men to institutions, and to apotheosize mediocrity. Nietzsche met pain with a power which transformed even death into life, and turned the day of his death even into a festival of the soul. He taught himself and he taught others to believe in that power, which alone is great,—to believe in the Power of the Will! Nietzsche, like Jesus, proclaimed the inestimable worth of the individual man, saw for him vast and glorious possibilities, sought the regeneration of society through the regeneration of the individual. Both committed the fortunes of the cause to which they devoted their lives to individuals and not to masses of men. Both believed that the best was yet to be. Both believed in the inwardness, the self-dependence, and the autonomy of personality. Neither ever side-stepped or flinched.
Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do nothing great and original and special—this is what we call civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life, according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far below—that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue, buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one’s slumbers are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up, all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days? What the man of civilization hates he calls “bad,” what he loves he calls “good.” Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the “good” people, the brave and the strong are the “bad.” Accordingly, also, it is comfortable to be “moral.” All one needs is to attune one’s life to the “common run,” to quarantine against every profound disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, “morality” may be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection. And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why, such crouching is called “virtue,” and the daring to resist and escape the lash, this of course is “vice.” In a word, the most will-less is the most virtuous. Thus—such was Nietzsche’s uncanny insight—“moral laws” are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! “Morality” is a poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be palsied. “Morality” is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to self-affirmation.
Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves—those who duck and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength, having one’s own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee, not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father’s house, not the “prodigal” who hungered in the far country, heads the scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to “pass a law,” this is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it!
So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of “virtuous people” was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good. This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave. Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself, sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside us, is “to fall from grace” indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper, for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good; what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad. The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most labyrinthan aberration of thought, dares to wring a new strength to live, is good; all pusillanimity, all over-mastery by pain, all collapse under the burden of life, all disappointing desert of the censure, “O ye of little faith, why are ye fearful?”—all this is bad. It will be a new day for man when he feels it wrong and immoral to lament his lot, to whine, but right and moral to earn strength from pain, a will to labor from temptation to die. Not the fear of the moral man to sin, but the fear to be weak, so that one cannot do one’s work in the world—that is to be the fear in the future. The powerful will, nay, the will become power itself, the fixed heart, the keyed and concentrated personality; this means freedom from every slave yoke. And it means that life is no longer at the mercy of capricious and contingent gain and loss, but a King’s Crown conquered in conflict with itself, with man, and with God.
Also sprach Nietzsche-Zarathustra!
Keats and Fanny Brawne
By Charlotte Wilson
He tried to pour the torrents of his love