The Gospel of Nietzsche

John Figgis

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781537811116
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

IT is related of Archbishop Benson that when he first made acquaintance with London society he asked in his bewilderment: "What do these people believe?" If he were alive to-day he would suffer a like astonishment, but his question would rather take the form: "What don't these people believe?" So strange is the welter of creeds and sects, of religions and irreligious, moralists and immoralists, mystics, rationalists, and realists, and even Christians, that it is hard to guess what nostrum may be dominant with your nextdoor neighbour. It may be a dietetic evangel, it may be an atheistic apocalypse. One phenomenon, not the least notable of our day, is the rejection by large numbers of all the values, which even in the broadest sense could be called Christian. It is not of Christianity as a creed, but Christianity as a way that I speak...

THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE

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WHAT IS THE SECRET OF Nietzsche’s vogue? Even if we were to adopt the view of Signor Papini, that the secret of Nietzsche, veiled from us by a lofty eloquence, is weakness, we should still be far from explaining the spell which he exerts. That spell is a fact. Nietzsche has some conquering charm in him. By this he attracts not only Nietzschweans pure and simple, whose reading of his doctrine might not always be acceptable to their master, but many others. Superior persons, or those liking the pose of aristocracy without its obligations, young men and even more young women glad to be free of tradition find in him a new-born hope; some philosophers who disagree with him profoundly, and Christians who are opposed to his central doctrine may be found to admire and almost to love the hermit of Sils-Maria, the prophet of Zarathustra, the singer of the Eternal Recurrence. Musicians and educationists prize him for much that he says about positive as against negative virtue, and for the wide horizons of culture he sets before his “higher men.” “Every idiot fancies himself an Übermensch” was a remark made once to me by an erudite Bavarian. The pocket edition of Also sprach Zarathustra marks a circulation of close on 140,000. In the British Museum there are to be found about one hundred books and pamphlets on him in German alone; many in other languages. M. Bernoulli devotes two immense volumes to the friendship between Nietzsche and the Swiss historical theologian Overbeck. Even his personal affairs are the subject of almost a wide literature. What is the meaning of this?

Not entirely, not mainly, his message.

Some people there have been who are for treating Nietzsche as negligible and dismissing his criticisms as the ravings of a lunatic. That is not a wise proceeding, as M. Seillières points out at the close of a work devoted to severe criticism, Apollon ou Dionysos. Mere insanity would not have given him such a vogue. Nowadays, at least, his wide-spread prevalence makes it impossible to leave him aside. Let us take his influence as a fact, and in this lecture try to gain some notion of his charm. In the next we can consider his importance. How much of enduring fame he will win no one can prophesy.

First of all comes the fact of the extraordinary personal character of all his writings. We see in Nietzsche, no less than we do in Newman, the literary expression of a soul on fire. Nietzsche will not write until he has fused his brooding thought into a unity of feeling. When he does write, that unity of feeling is so deeply concentrated that his very force tends to take captive the reader, almost irrespective of what he says. Schellwien in his little book on Stirner and Nietzsche pronounces that he is so entirely a dogmatist in his writing that one must always take him or leave him, according as his ideas appeal intuitively. Nietzsche felt this himself. In a letter to Georg Brandes he said that he had come to distrust dialectic and even all grounds at all, i. e., he must go by pure intuition. This does not mean that he took up notions at random; rather that he went through the long psychical process of weighing and reconsidering, and then, when the whole seemed clear, he kicked away the ladder, ending by thinking it a bore, a waste of time, to discuss the grounds. If a person could not see what he saw, Nietzsche would not convert him by argument.

It is this power to write with blood of which he boasts. Nietzsche, in his own view, lived more deeply than other people, and therefore, having mastered the art of expression, he was able to write with such compelling force. The certainty, the prophetic conviction with which he writes have in them something as of a vision, a thing seen. More and more this note of dogmatism has become effective in our day. It is notable alike in philosophy, in literature, in politics. The note of absoluteness may do no more than express a strong personal idiosyncrasy. In this age, however, unlike some others, this is an advantage; the tentative scientific understatement is apt to repel. We can see this in our political and artistic controversies; in most of our popular essays and in nearly all modern criticism. It may be a consequence of the weakness of an age which wants to be secured against its own timidity. But it is a fact.

Secondly — but this is largely the consequence of that personal quality — Nietzsche strikes the imagination. This is what is needed now to secure any man an empire. Whether in politics or philosophy or business, it is not intellect but imaginative authority that wins a spell. Even if those were right who identified the teaching of Nietzsche with that of Max Stirner, they would never be able to secure for the latter one tithe of the popularity of Nietzsche.

Max Stirner lacks these qualities of style and imagination. It may be said that all this is briefly summed in the statement that Nietzsche is a poet. That is true. “Art,” we are told, “is the expression of sincere emotion,” and judged by that canon Nietzsche is an artist of no mean order. His genius is essentially lyrical. That is to say, it is his personal, individual feeling which breaks into the “lyrical cry,” and this feeling is always or nearly always measured by some criticism of life. Thus, his poetic quality embodies the two strands. It is not mere singing, in some enchanted garden, away from the drab dulness of the world; it is not mere philosophy uninformed by experience; it is the fusion of the two by the alembic of a vivid personality, which gives Nietzsche his charm, and will probably continue to give it. Take, for instance, the Night-Song in Zarathustra. This was one of Nietzsche’s own favourites:

“‘Night it is: now talk louder all springing wells. And my soul is a springing well.

“‘Night it is: only now all songs of the loving awake. And my soul is the song of a loving one.

“‘Something never stilled, something never to be stilled is within me. It longeth to give forth sound. A longing for love is within me, that itself speaketh the language of love.

“‘Light I am: would that I were night! But it is my loneliness, to be girded round by light.

“‘Oh, that I were dark and like the night! How would I suck at the breasts of light!

“‘And I would bless even you, ye small, sparkling stars and glowworms on high — and be blessed by your gifts of light!

“‘But in mine own light I live, back into myself I drink the flames that break forth from me.

“‘I know not the happiness of the receiver. And often I dreamt that stealing was needs much sweeter than receiving.

“‘It is my poverty that my hand never resteth from giving; it is mine envy that I see waiting eyes and the illuminated nights of longing.

“‘Oh, unblessedness of all givers! Oh, obscuration of my sun! Oh, longing for longing! Oh, famished voracity in the midst of satisfaction!

“‘They take things from me; but do I touch their soul? There is a gulf between giving and taking, and the smallest gulf is the most difficult to bridge over.

“‘A hunger waxeth out of my beauty: I would cause pain unto those whom I bring light; I would fain bereave those I gave my gifts to. Thus am I hungry for wickedness.

“‘Taking back my hand when another hand stretcheth out for it; hesitating like the waterfall that hesitateth when raging down — thus am I hungry for wickedness.

“‘Such revenge is invented by mine abundance; such insidiousness springeth from my loneliness.

“‘My happiness of giving died from giving; my virtue became weary of itself from its abundance!

“‘He who always giveth is in danger to lose his sense of shame; he who always distributeth getteth hard swellings on his hand and heart from distributing.

“‘Mine eye no longer floweth over from the shame of the begging ones; my hand hath become too hard to feel the trembling of full hands.

“‘Whither went the tear of mine eye, and the down of my heart? Oh, solitude of all givers! Oh, silence of all lighters!

“‘Many suns circle round in empty space: unto all that is dark they speak with their light — unto me they are silent.

“‘Oh, that is the enmity of light against what shineth! Without pity it wandereth on its course.

“‘Unfair towards what shineth in the heart of its heart, cold towards suns, thus walketh every sun.

“‘Like the storm the suns fly on their courses; that is their walking. They follow their inexorable will; that is their coldness.

“‘Oh, it is only ye, ye dark ones, ye of the night who create warmth out of what shineth! Oh, it is only ye who drink milk and refreshment from the udders of light!

“‘Alas, there is ice round me; my hand burneth itself when touching what is icy! Alas, there is thirst within me that is thirsty for your thirst!

“‘Night it is: alas, that I must be a light! And a thirst for what is of the night! And solitude!

“‘Night it is: now, like a well, my longing breaketh forth from me. I am longing for speech.

“‘Night it is: now talk louder all springing wells. And my soul is a springing well.

“‘Night it is: only now all songs of the loving awake. And my soul is the song of a loving one.’

“Thus sang Zarathustra”.

Nietzsche’s sense of his own inspiration finds vent in a highly charged passage of Ecce Homo, quoted in the last lecture. The megalomania of that piece is repulsive. Yet, some of the analysis is acute. Zarathustra — and that is Nietzsche at his highest — has that quality of inevitableness in the writing which belongs to the highest art. The sense of far distances, of a translucent atmosphere as though the Alps had made themselves into music, is with us very frequently; also a certain iridescence of changing colours. One of the minor merits of Nietzsche is the multiplicity of fresh landscapes and kaleidoscopic variety of his pictures. As M. Fouillée remarks:

“Sa poésie est un lyrisme puissant: sa philosophie a je ne sais quoi de pittoresque qui réduit l’imagination; c’est une série de tableaux, de paysages, de visions et de rêves, un voyage romantique en un pays enchanté, où les scùnes terribles succèdent aux scènes joyeuses, où le burlesque s’intercale au milieu du sublime. Nietzsche est sympathique par les grands câtés. La seule chose antipathique en cette belle âme c’est la superbe de la pensée. Toute doctrine d’aristocratie exclusive est d’ailleurs une doctrine d’orgueil, et tout or gueil n’est-il pas un commencement de folie? Chez Nietzsche le sentiment aristocratique a quelque chose de maladif.”

Probably not a little of his attraction for many is owing to this. This is the day of flash-light and electric movement. Nietzsche is like a motor, whirling the occupant through many countries, giving at once the sense of rapid movement and of changeful beauty. His very inconsistencies and the aphoristic habit are a help in this respect. Many of his books — though not the best — can be opened and read for a minute or two and convey in this way both light and artistic pleasure.

This must be the case with a genius so essentially pyrotechnic, with rockets and Roman candles, and then the more elaborate set pieces, to attract the deep “Oh” of the crowd. For, although he despised the crowd, it is to the crowd and to some of the characteristics of an age of vulgar machinery that Nietzsche owes part of his popularity.

Not that he does not deserve it as a writer. He worked at style. Early in his life he declared that he was mastered by the Categorical Imperative: Thou must write. Nor must we call him a spontaneous artist. That note of the inevitable, of inspiration, is the end, not the beginning — it is the flash of insight that comes at the end of long, almost hopeless toil, the brilliant vision that is the reward of torments both of body and spirit. Plainly he declares that none but fools can suppose that writing is easy. He is right; what a pity they do not abstain from publishing! Countless gibes he casts at the Germans for their heavy feet in literature. Their clumsy and awkward notion of style is a source to him of frequent merriment. No one who had so high a regard for French culture would be likely to underrate the value of polish. Nietzsche, moreover, is well aware that great style is an imaginative quality, not mere statement. Mr. Bernard Shaw has done much to popularise Nietzsche by “Man and Superman.” Yet the two writers are poles apart. Mr. Shaw may seem a poet to the German Chancellor. That is akin to his other “errors.” Somewhere or other Mr. Shaw declared that “effectiveness of statement is the one quality of good writing.” Were this true, we ought all to go to school to that new genre in literature — advertisement. Nietzsche saw just the opposite. Writing is akin to music. It is an appeal to the subsconcious more than to the logical faculty. Otherwise mathematical treatises would be the noblest literature, and the writer of an index or a synopsis superior in many cases to his original. Language is used sometimes, and Mr. Shaw lends colour to this view, if he does not reach it, which would imply that there would be little lost if, instead of the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, we had some such abstract as the following:

Love, described by St. Paul, characteristics of, more excellent than other gifts; superior to (a) eloquence, (b) martyrdom, (c) faith, (d) giving charity, their worthlessness without love, as illustrated by (a) brass (b) cymbals; its enduring quality; self-emptying; faith, hope, in what way inferior; illustrated by author’s own growth from child to adult.

This dilemma, or something like it, is what lies before the numerous people who regard themselves as superior to the style prejudice and condemn a work in proportion as it is well written. Nietzsche, who made so much of the rhythmic element, the dance, knew very well that language is a sacrament of the soul, and that style is good or bad in proportion as it is able to communicate this. He declares it in his love of musical terms to be the communication by means of the rhythm and colour of words of a certain tempo — i. e., the creation of a condition in the reader — emotional, imaginative, and intellectual. In another place he says: “My style is a dance.”

In the degree in which this is done we have really great writing. Most writing fails in this, because it is too conventional, not always because the writers do not feel greatly. In early days all writing tends to become a cento of conventional phrases, e. g., children’s letters. Only later on does self-expression in any degree become possible. That other ideal of Mr. Shaw means self-expression of a kind, but only of one kind — it assumes that all of us are perpetually in debate, and that some form or other of platform speaking is the end. Even here, when platform speaking reaches a high point, it passes with an orator into something like poetic communication. Nietzsche’s interest as a writer comes partly from this power of placing discussions, apparently academic, in a setting of beauty and imagination. This is manifest in one of Nietzsche’s earliest works, a course of lectures delivered at Basle on The Future of Our Educational Institutions. The picture of the meeting of the two students with the old professor and his friend, and the overhearing of their conversation provides at once a scene into which the reader can enter with sympathy. Akin to this is another quality, which comes of Nietzsche’s passionate onesidedness. Not only has he come to see everything in a unity, but he forces the reader to do so, and persuades him before he is aware. Some dialecticians will quietly assume premises which cut off nearly all the objections of their interlocutor. Not by dialectic, but through the force of their personality they prevent him remembering these objections by driving all his energies to defend what is really some side-issue. Thus they win an easy victory. In the field, thus artificially limited, they are right. Some of Nietzsche’s charm is due to this method. In the Genealogy of Morals or Antichrist he commonly discerns some motive really operative among certain people, e. g., resentment at weakness. Then by his own chosen one-sidedness he isolates this factor and by the force of his personality prevents the casual reader from seeing any other. To a mind at all trained, his early history of the Jewish people and of early Christianity is a travesty of the facts, no less than the attempt to make our Lord the preacher of a Tolstoyan Gospel of Quietism. Nietzsche owed to Tolstoy and to Schopenhauer more than he supposed. His account of the personality of Christ is merely a work of imagination; it ignores all the sterner side and takes him as a preacher of non-resistance pure and simple.

To take another instance. The Will to Power truly expresses an important element in all life; nor is it by a process of far-fetched interpretation altogether impossible to reduce everything to scale. The attempt, on the whole, is no whit different from that of the hedonist, whom Nietzsche despised, to explain all human action by the motive of pleasure-seeking. The process of interpretation in each case has to be so elaborate as to deprive it of all value. In The Will to Power the skill of Nietzsche is shown not so much in...

Table of contents

• FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE MAN
• THE GOSPEL OF NIETZSCHE
• NIETZSCHE AND CHRISTIANITY
• NIETZSCHE’S ORIGINALITY
• THE CHARM OF NIETZSCHE
• THE DANGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NIETZSCHE