George Burman Foster
A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world, slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and bewildered, is worthless—such is the melancholy mood of modernity. Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents, they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call Weltschmerz has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song—the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.
First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life—a monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life’s impulses, on whose development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call their ragout, compounded according to their own recipe, “original” Christianity.
There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.
Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the modern mind?
All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.
One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not backward, but forward! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way!
Hence, a man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche!
I do not know how many of you know the poet of Zarathustra. But if you do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his. Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by any champion of blatant and blind bourgeoisie, refuted regularly by pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers, his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that “the man is dead”; that he belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive, now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh, he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences—these were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future—and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche.
The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again—