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This was the first book on Nietzsche
published in the English language (1908).
Introduction
THE philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and
the music (and quasi-music) of Richard Strauss:
herein we have our modern substitutes for
Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There
is no escaping Nietzsche. You may hold him
a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous
skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is
in your ears and his blasphemies sink into
your mind. He has colored the thought and
literature, the speculation and theorizing,
the politics and superstition of the time.
He reigns as king in the German universities
– where, since Luther’s day, all the world’s
most painful thinking has been done – and
his echoes tinkle, harshly or faintly, from
Chicago to Mesopotamia. His ideas appear
in the writings of men as unlike as Roosevelt
and Bernard Shaw; even the newspapers are
aware of him. He is praised and berated,
accepted and denounced, canonized and damned.
Pythagoras had no more devout disciples and
Spinoza had no more murderous and violent
foes. Wherefore it may be a toil of some
profit to examine his ideas a bit closely;
to differentiate between what he said in
his books and what his apostles and interpreters
and enemies say or think he said; and in
the end, perhaps, to find out what he meant.
Despite the notion of those who know him
but by name or ill-fame, there is nothing
cryptic or mysterious about Nietzsche. His
ideas are ever clear. Curiously enough, the
popular comprehension of his philosophy suffers
by this very fact, for the world has come
to regard the metaphysic as something properly
and necessarily occult and to expect its
expounders, if they would seem truly wise,
to show the abysmal turgidity of a Kant and
the wild, cabalistic imbecility of Revelations.
When there arises a prophet like Nietzsche,
who thinks his thoughts accurately and puts
them into the vulgar tongue, he is commonly
suspected to be some sort of fantastic and
preposterous joker. Instead of accepting
his prophecy in its surface sense, his audience
sees, in its very obviousness, a new and
extraordinarily confusing form of riddle.
Such is the curse that rabbinism, in and
out of the church, has laid upon the propagation
of ideas.
Nietzsche’s literalness is the hallmark of
his entire philosophy. He is the high priest
of the actual, and the divine mysteries seem
to him to be but so many grotesque lunacies.
Stripping an idea of its holiness and romance,
its antiquity and authority, he burrows down
into the heart of it and tries to estimate
it in terms of its actual probability and
reasonableness. That a thing is sacred or
venerable or ancient or beautiful does not
interest him. The question is asked invariably,
Is it true? If he concludes that it is not,
he says so, and if it happens to be something
that is regarded with unusual reverence by
the majority of men – which means something
whose inviolability is accepted without inquiry
or the shadow of doubt – he says so with
unusual heat and clamor. He is, indeed, the
king of all axiom smashers and the arch dissenter
of the age. To him such words as good and
godly have no meaning whatever. He regards
them as mere scarecrows and bugaboos, invented
and employed by sophists and doctrinaires
to ward off that free inquiry which would
put their fallacies to rout.
Reduced to elementals, Nietzsche’s philosophy
consists of the following propositions:
1. That the ever-dominant and only inherent
impulse in all living beings, including man,
is the will to remain alive – the will, that
is, to attain power over those forces which
make life difficult or impossible.
2. That all schemes of morality are nothing
more than efforts to put into permanent codes
the expedients found useful by some given
race in the course of its successful endeavors
to remain alive.
3. That, despite the universal tendency to
give these codes authority by crediting them
to some god, they are essentially man-made
and mutable, and so change, or should change,
as the conditions of human existence in the
world are modified.
4. That the human race should endeavor to
make its mastery over its environment more
and more certain, and that it is its destiny,
therefore, to widen more and more the gap
which now separates it from the lower races
of animals.
5. That any code of morality which retains
its permanence and authority after the conditions
of existence which gave rise to it have changed,
works against this upward progress of mankind
toward greater and greater efficiency.
6. That all gods and religions, because they
have for their main object the protection
of moral codes against change, are inimitable
to the life and well-being of healthy and
efficient men.
7. That all the ideas which grow out of such
gods and religions – such, for example, as
the Christian ideas of humility, of self-sacrifice
and of brotherhood – are enemies of life,
too.
8. That human beings of the ruling, efficient
class should reject all gods and religions,
and with them the morality at the bottom
of them and the ideas which grow out of them,
and restore to its ancient kingship that
primal instinct which enables every efficient
individual to differentiate between the things
which are beneficial to him and the things
which are harmful.
Here we have the bare framework or skeleton
of Nietzsche’s system. How it leads to a
rejection of Christianity and democracy;
how it points out a possible evolution of
the human race through the immoralist to
the superman; how it combats the majority
of the ideas held holy and impeccable by
mankind today – all of this is set forth
in the pages that follow. The aim of this
book is to translate Nietzsche into terms
familiar to everyone – to show the exact
bearing of his philosophy upon matters which
every man must consider every day. Nietzsche
dealt chiefly with generalizations and abstractions,
and when he descended to imminent concerns
he naturally selected those things which
most interested his countrymen. In this book
his conclusions are applied to the things
which most interest the two great races whose
tongue is English. To this extent paraphrase
has been admitted, but in all statements
of fundamental doctrines there has been a
faithful and literal rendering of the original
text – a rendering interrupted, of course,
whenever it has seemed necessary to explain
or elucidate, by foot-note, parable or digression.
In the biographical portion of this book
an effort has been made to show the growth
of Nietzsche’s system, from its beginning
in mute consciousness to its maturity in
clear and unmistakable propositions. In the
last part an attempt has been made to trace
out the origin of this system in the ideas
of other men; to show how it agrees or disagrees
with human experience; and finally, to estimate
its influence upon the great and little men
of the world today and its probable influence
tomorrow. It is high time for the race of
Darwin and Huxley to know Nietzsche better.
When his ideas are calmly weighed, they may
be rejected, but it will be infinitely better
to weigh and reject them thus than to condemn
them out of hand and without knowing what
they are.
Nietzsche himself believed that he was but
a link in an endless chain and that, in the
course of time, his doctrines would be overthrown
by the philosophy of better men. Be this
as it may, the fact is apparent that he fought
a good fight and made his fellow men his
debtors. Error was his enemy and he was ever
merciless in combating it, even when the
combat meant a war upon himself. He attacked
men, gods and devils, but his purpose was
ever the lofty one of discovering the truth.
It is the fashion among the adherents of
the old order to berate him for his ferocity,
and to urge the sorrows of his darkened life
against him, but some day, perhaps, the world
will learn to give men of his kind the honor
that is their due. It is a fine thing to
face machine guns for immortality and a medal,
but isn’t it fine, too, to face calumny,
injustice and loneliness for the truth which
makes men free? .
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