“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called ‘life.’”
The sin of the schoolmaster against man as he piles dead history in the image of the ugliest man upon the present, and blocks his future—all this has first attained to power and recognition through the political system, and has thereby become a fatality, an extremity of the cultural life of old Europe. So Nietzsche saw and said as he looked abroad over the lands and peoples of his day. Out of the spiritual formation of the individual, the state made a mechanical drill of the masses. Out of the teacher and educator of the people, there came to be a master of a school, a slave of a rule, of a method. The state laid its hand on head and heart—then it needed the historian to manipulate and adjust history for political purposes. The state took science into its service—and conquered praise from the mouth of the artist himself!
To seek salvation from political sickness, this is now the redemptive service of all the men and women to whom man is higher than the state—to whom the ideals of humanity and of personality are alone sacred and supreme. The remedy today is what it once was in old Rome: secession, migration of the spirit to the holy mount of freedom, where the soul breathes no state air, where it is not suffocated and oppressed by the iron bars of the state. Secession in art—that means unpolitical art, an art which knows higher tasks than the glorification of political power, than the erection of shafts of victory, than promenades of victory! Secession in science—that means a free university whose teachers, says Nietzsche, do not receive their appointments through superannuated militarists and ministers of state, a high school of the spirit, in which there are no political honors and insignia, but also no state discipline and non-age—a school where everything is said and taught which an earnest inquiring soul can receive from the world of nature and of man in earnest responses of his spirit. Secession in religion—that means, finally, a free church, in which faith is not an official dictation, but a firm conviction of the inner man, a church where worship is not an inherited rule and custom, but the heart’s and life’s free expression in ways of its own. Who will deny that the best and highest which our day has to show in every sphere of the spirit’s life, must be considered everywhere as a work of secession, of rebellion; that all this has an anarchistic vein, an unpolitical, antipolitical, yes, a superpolitical stamp? Over all finer natures there have come a bitter depression and indignation at all political doing and dickering; they would rather stay and work at home where no one strives nor cries, than walk the streets so full of the uproar which politicians make. All souls, turned to within, the clairvoyants of the spirit and the fine tasters of life agree of course with Nietzsche, that “where the state ends, there man begins”! The state has its pattern and uniform for the “many too many,” for the superfluous who in great choruses bawl of the most superfluous that there is for man. Great souls seek sites for lone ones and twain ones, they seek them beyond the many too many—there they sing the songs of that which is necessary for man, the single and irreplaceable melody, through which man jubilates along to his higher existence. The state has killed and crushed the peoples, it has summoned into the world the great lie: “I, the state, am the people.” But there is only one redemption and convalescence from the state on the part of the people, a flight “to people who do not understand the state and hate it as an evil eye and sin in custom and law; which speaks its own tongue of good and evil and makes its own language of custom and law.” Thus is secession the emigration from the state into the people; the culture of the future is the overcoming of the state through the people!
To be sure, it is with mixed feelings that we penetrate and interpret the preaching of the anarchist Nietzsche. The catalogue of sins which, on a deeper observation of life, we have to charge to state cultus is indeed great, and hence there is an anarchistic side to the heart of the modern man, as soon as he thinks of his own rights, as soon as he requires light and air for the free unfolding of his personality. We know that the state does not possess eternal life. The state is only a special form in which human social life can exist, not human society itself. There have not always been states. They came to be in the long course of the evolution of a people’s life! What comes to be must pay its toll to Father Time. The state will change—and pass! Hence it is indeed folly and superstition, it is idolatry, when we attribute eternal worth to transitory phenomena, and accord them an unconditional dominion over us.
But, for all that, there is the state still; and although we may not say with Hegel, the special hero of state omnipotence, that all that is real is rational, yet never is anything that really is, entirely irrational. The state is still the soil on which we stand and which we till, that it may be able to receive the seed of the spirit—the state is an evolutionary stage of human culture. It is a vessel for the reception of the life of the human spirit. It is one of the conditions of life through which present man must make his way of necessity, if he is to fulfil his highest destiny. Therefore it is also folly and superstition, an idolatry of one’s own ego, and of one’s own personality, if a man thinks he can unfold the wealth of the human by turning aside from the state. Where the life interests of man solidify to political tendencies, there remains something for the solitary man to see and to learn, to do and to achieve; and it is a subtle and dangerous temptation when a man in his solitude proposes to find his satisfaction in the enjoyment of his books and in the world of his own thoughts and feelings without concern for the weal or woe of the political body of which he is a member. Politics is raw to refined natures. But so is all the material with which man labors, and out of which he fashions what is fine. Let creative spirits make out of the state a human society in which all human greatness can grow.
The idolatry of the state is, like any idolatry, a poison in popular life. But the antidote which anarchism administers to the present generation, sick of the state, namely, dominion on the part of the ego, the cultus of the Ichmensch, does not make the matter better, but perhaps only worse. The personality of man is indeed his summum bonum, his soul and life; but only the whole, free, full personality, which feels the pulsations of the common life of humanity, of the world—only the man to whom, as old Terence said, nothing human is foreign, because he is in a position to read in all the human the language and revelation of the eternal. This man is a political being, but not a political being alone. He has his own soul which he affirms against any claim of politics and preserves from injury. He lives in the state, but also above the state. He knows well-springs of being without which the state would be a desert and dry ground. He is a religious personality who falls down and supplicates no majesty, because he knows God whom alone we ought to worship and serve!
Book Discussion
Egomania
Contemporary Portraits, by Frank Harris. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
You have surely come across that ubiquitous individual who immortalizes his travels abroad through innumerable “Kodaks,” to be rubbed into your eyes on every opportune and inopportune occasion. He bores you ad nauseam. Why? You are offered an opportunity to observe the majestic Mont Blanc, the smoking Vesuvius, the respectable Eiffel Tower, the San Marco, the Brandenburg Gate, the Westminster Abbey, and the rest of the hackneyed wonders. Yet you are nauseated. Your individual has caused the Kodak to utilize the magnificent views as backgrounds for his own central figure; you are compelled to seek the Schlangenberg behind the back of the complacently smiling tourist. A curious rooster strolling over a map is harmless, until he gets an inspiration to add something of his own.