STUDIES ON FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

BY M. D. PETRE.

III.

NIETZSCHE THE ANTI-MORALIST.

N so far as his practical influence is concerned, Nietzsche the poet has been merged and forgotten in Nietzsche the anti-moralist; or, if remembered, has been so chiefly as contributing eloquence and charm to the moralistic writings.

In the last article my readers may have seen some reasons to question the truth of this estimate. Nietzsche as poet and. artist was usually at his best; Nietzsche as anti-moralist, or immoralist, was sometimes at his best, but often at his very worst-and Nietzsche at his worst was something very bad indeed, and more harmful just by reason of his violence and shallowness. It is the extreme assertion of pernicious maxims, rather than a more scientific treatment, that works injury. The exaggeration which has descended as low as a lie, has its own short and ill-omened reward; it engenders vulgar belief.

The dangers, however, of many of Nietzsche's anti-moral aphorisms is actually non-existent, for those who are inspired by the more modern and spiritual philosophy, in contradistinction to the outworn materialistic and mechanical theories. In spite of his very keen-sighted criticism of the English utilitarian philosophers, Nietzsche's method was not so entirely different from theirs.

"These English psychologists," he says, "what do they really want? Whether wilfully or not, we find them always at the same work, dragging the 'partie honteuse' of our inner world into the foreground, and finding the cause, motive, and deciding factors of our development just in that wherein the intellectual pride of man would least wish to find it."

And yet a few pages later we find him seeking the true sense of the word "good" in its earliest and barbaric coneption; and he tells us, with satisfaction, that "schuld,"

*Zur Genealogie der Moral. I. Par. 1.

"debt," meant, first simply "schulden," to owe, in the sense of material or pecuniary obligation. Is not this also to make the lowest instinct the parent of the highest; to explain the noblest development of which man is capable by its meanest commencement ?

But nous avons changé tout cela." It is no longer regarded as the best scientific, any more than the best philosophical, method to explain the plant or the animal by the seed; the cultured and civilized state by the barbarous tribe; the richest developments of reason and conscience by savage and rudimentary instincts.

Equally false would it be to take no account of these earlier stages. But our method has been widened and reversed. It has dawned on us that the greater is more likely to include the lesser than vice-versa, and that in the highest are to be sought the reason and explanation of the lowest. Nietzsche criticizes the notion of "absicht," of purpose and intention, as a fallacy in our moral consideration.

"In the unintentional element of our action," he says, "is its decisive worth; its purpose, all that is seen, known, and conscious therein, is of the surface and skin only." +

In so far as he denies to the individual alone a full knowledge of end and intention, and holds that, in every action of man, there is something more than one, personally, can gauge and comprehend, he goes in no way counter to a spiritual philosophy, which can fully recognise the force and value of spontaneity. But he does also tend to exclude from an action. the end and purpose which are involved in its very essence, and thereby approximates to the mechanical theory. Those who have imbibed the later and more comprehensive notions. will, therefore, be unhurt by that part of his philosophy which is based on these narrower and outworn conceptions. We look now for the reason of the first in the last, for the reason of the worst in the best.

I.

GAI SAVOIR.

In the title of one of his later, but not latest, works, Nietz sche expresses the aim and outcome of his moral studies. They resulted in a state of gay or joyful or happy knowledge, Fröhliche Wissenschaft; that state to which he so often al

* Idem. I., 4, and II., 8.

↑ Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Par. 32.

ludes, directly or indirectly, when he describes the light-heartedness of the intellectual "free-lance," who not only walks but positively dances on the heights and on the edges of the precipices. This state of "think and do as you like" he consid ers attainable, like its religious counterpart, only through much effort and suffering and endurance. Old ties must be cut, old affections quenched, old habits broken, in that whole-hearted service of truth, which is to find its reward in its own cise, in the keen delights of the intellectual chase, in that freedom and detachment of the mind which bounds along in pursuit of one sole object, invulnerable by the very fact of its nakedness. A thousand years earlier and Nietzsche would have been a Christian anchorite, devoted to solitary contemplation in the African desert.

Most of us have had at least some slight experience of these periods of intellectual freedom and exaltation, when the whole force of our nature is summed up in the single joy of knowledge and thought, when the emotions are still and the heart has no ache.

Oh the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.*

To return to the discussion of our last article, this is a phase in which Dionysos has been pressed into the service of Apollo; the hidden forces of emotion and feeling, of the mysterious underworld of our nature, are, for a moment, reinforcing the purely intellectual faculties, so that we seem to need nothing beyond the delight of thought.

But Nietzsche's earlier studies should have warned him that this was no permanent condition; that the "periphery of knowledge," as he himself put it, would soon be struck, and the mind awakened from its joyful dream. This happened in his own case, though not to the extent which might have been expected. What we would call the purely scientific stage of Human, too Human suffered amendment and modification later on; and "Wir Gelehrten," "We Savants" of Beyond Good and Evil

some of the castigation which they had equally well de

"Saul." Robert Browning.

served, but escaped, in Human, too Human. Yet, on the whole, there is no doubt that Nietzsche endeavored, an endeavor which was partly successful, to lead the latter part of his life in a kind of mental abstraction, reducing every other faculty to the service of his intellect.

As usual, Nietzsche was prepared to make all the sacrifices that should be demanded in this whole-hearted pursuit of truth. He even fell into the frequent delusion which leads us to suppose that a course of action may be desirable, not only in spite of the sacrifice it demands, but actually by reason of it. He sprang forward to meet any new and subversive revelation with the enthusiasm of martyr or fanatic who faces the kindled pile. He accepted, without the necessary spiritual reaction, the crushing lesson of immensity, and came at last to well-nigh rejoice in the crude denial of old-established values. What he most sincerely regarded as pure love of truth, degenerated into recklessness, and he squandered hard-earned convictions, as a savage nation scatters works of art which it cannot understand. His "will to be strong" was corrupted to a "will to be rough," and he developed an increasing taste for violent assertions and denials, which grew to the dimensions of a mania.

II.

MASTERFUL AND SLAVISH MORALITY.

One of the first points to be noted in Nietzsche's antimoralism is its undisguised advocacy of egoism and self-assertion. In Human, too Human we could gather countless aphorisms, witty perhaps, but not very original, in which the old difficulty is raised, the old contradictions are exposed, which inhere in the very notion of a wholly unselfish action. The difficulty is, indeed, unanswerable from a certain standpoint. When the love of self and the love of the neighbor are conceived as two wholly separate affections, it is well-nigh impossible to find a solid ground for the second. How are we, for example, to answer this argument of Nietzsche? The unselfish man, he says, must suppose:

"That the other is selfish enough to continually accept his sacrifice and his life; so that loving and self-sacrificing men have an interest in the preservation of others who are self and incapable of sacrifice; and thus the highest moral

order to exist, must produce immorality, thus tending to its own extinction."*

In other places he develops this objection with still more persuasiveness and power, basing his argument, not only on the fallacy of altruism, but also on its actual uselessness, as a roundabout and ineffectual way of procuring the same good which egoism attains far more fully and directly. In a passage on "Nobleness," he writes:

"What makes a man noble? Not sacrifice, for the most extreme sensualist is capable of sacrifice. Not the following of a passion; for some passions are shameful. Not the serving of others without any self-seeking, for perhaps it is just the selfseeking of the noblest which brings forth the greatest results. No; but something in passion which is special though not conscious; a discernment which is rare and singular and akin to frenzy; a sense of heat in things which for others, are cold; a perception of values for which no estimate has been established ; a sacrificing on altars which are dedicated to an unknown God; a courage that claims no homage; a self-sufficiency which is super-abundant aud unites men and things." †

This passage will remind us of Nietzsche's conception of the highest art, which is inspired, not by want, by longing, by desire, but by fulness, overflow, and strength; nor would it be fair to estimate his philosophy of egoism without bearing this characteristic in mind. Putting his argument at the best, here is what it would be:

We want strong men; power and strength are the highest qualifications of God or man; life itself is, at core, the will to be mighty and strong. (And, let us observe, in passing, that this theory is, after all, not so very objectionable as a fundamental conception. Nietzsche did not mean by strength that which is merely physical, and, in the choice of ultimates, it would seem to matter little which we select; life may be called a force, as well as it may be called many other things, provided only our term be comprehensive enough to constitute a final unity.)

Starting, then, with this theory, we find some men, these are the altruists, who would take from the strong and give to the weak; they teach that the ego must be sacrificed in the cause of the altar. Thus the healthy are given up to the ser

Menschliches, allzu Menschliches. Par. 133. + Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Par. 55.