He is fond of expressing himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers. He does this by employing the words “good” and “evil” with their ordinary connotations, and then saying that he prefers “evil” to “good.” His book, Beyond Good and Evil, really aims at changing the reader’s opinion as to what is good and what is evil, but professes, except at moments, to be praising what is “evil” and decrying what is “good.” He says, for instance, that it is a mistake to regard it as a duty to aim at the victory of good and the annihilation of evil; this view is English, and typical of “that blockhead, John Stuart Mill,” a man for whom he has a specially virulent contempt. Of him he says:
“I abhor the man’s vulgarity when he says ‘What is right for one man is right for another’; ‘Do not to others that which you would not that they should do unto you.’ * Such principles would fain establish the whole of human traffic upon mutual services, so that every action would appear to be a cash payment for something done to us. The hypothesis here is ignoble to the last degree: it is taken for granted
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* I seem to remember that some one anticipated Mill in this dictum.
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that there is some sort of equivalence in value between my actions and thine.” *
True virtue, as opposed to the conventional sort, is not for all, but should remain the characteristic of an aristocratic minority. It is not profitable or prudent; it isolates its possessor from other men; it is hostile to order, and does harm to inferiors. It is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters. “Everything that pampers, that softens, and that brings the ‘people’ or ‘woman’ to the front, operates in favour of universal suffrage–that is to say, the dominion of ‘inferior’ men.” The seducer was Rousseau, who made woman interesting; then came Harriet Beecher Stowe and the slaves; then the Socialists with their championship of workmen and the poor. All these are to be combated.
Nietzsche’s ethic is not one of self-indulgence in any ordinary sense; he believes in Spartan discipline and the capacity to endure as well as inflict pain for important ends. He admires strength of will above all things. “I test the power of a will,” he says, “according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage; I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been.” He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated. “The object is to attain that enormous energy of greatness which can model the man of the future by means of discipline and also by means of the annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched, and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight of the suffering created thereby, the like of which has never been seen before.” He prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars; one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfilment of his prophecy.
He is not, however, a worshipper of the State; far from it. He is a passionate individualist, a believer in the hero. The misery of a whole nation, he says, is of less importance than the suffering of a great individual: “The misfortunes of all these small folk do not together constitute a sum-total, except in the feelings of mighty men.”
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* In all quotations from Nietzsche, the italics are in the original.
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Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: “a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years.”
He is also not definitely anti-Semitic, though he thinks Germany contains as many Jews as it can assimilate, and ought not to permit any further influx of Jews. He dislikes the New Testament, but not the Old, of which he speaks in terms of the highest admiration. In justice to Nietzsche it must be emphasized that many modern developments which have a certain connection with his general ethical outlook are contrary to his clearly expressed opinions.
Two applications of his ethic deserve notice: first, his contempt for women; second, his bitter critique of Christianity.
He is never tired of inveighing against women. In his pseudoprophetical book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says that women are not, as yet, capable of friendship; they are still cats, or birds, or at best cows. “Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.” The recreation of the warrior is to be of a peculiar sort if one may trust his most emphatic aphorism on this subject: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.”
He is not always quite so fierce, though always equally contemptuous. In the Will to Power he says: “We take pleasure in woman as in a perhaps daintier, more delicate, and more ethereal kind of creature. What a treat it is to meet creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery in their minds! They have always been the delight of every tense and profound male soul.” However, even these graces are only to be found in women so long as they are kept in order by manly men; as soon as they achieve any independence they become intolerable. “Woman has so much cause for shame; in woman there is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion concealed . . . which has really been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man.” So he says in Beyond Good and Evil, where he adds that we should think of women as property, as Orientals do. The whole of his abuse of women is offered as self-evident truth; it is not backed up by evidence from history or from his own experience, which, so far as women were concerned, was almost confined to his sister.
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Nietzsche’s objection to Christianity is that it caused acceptance of what he calls “slave morality.” It is curious to observe the contrast between his arguments and those of the French philosophes who preceded the Revolution. They argued that Christian dogmas are untrue; that Christianity teaches submission to what is deemed to be the will of God, whereas self-respecting human beings should not bow before any higher Power; and that the Christian Churches have become the allies of tyrants, and are helping the enemies of democracy to deny liberty and continue to grind the faces of the poor. Nietzsche is not interested in the metaphysical truth of either Christianity or any other religion; being convinced that no religion is really true, he judges all religions entirely by their social effects. He agrees with the philosophes in objecting to submission to the supposed will of God, but he would substitute for it the will of earthly “artist-tyrants.” Submission is right, except for these supermen, but not submission to the Christian God. As for the Christian Churches’ being allies of tyrants and enemies of democracy, that, he says, is the very reverse of the truth. The French Revolution and Socialism are, according to him, essentially identical in spirit with Christianity; to all alike he is opposed, and for the same reason: that he will not treat all men as equal in any respect whatever.
Buddhism and Christianity, he says, are both “nihilistic” religions, in the sense that they deny any ultimate difference of value between one man and another, but Buddhism is much the less objectionable of the two. Christianity is degenerative, full of decaying and excremental elements; its driving force is the revolt of the bungled and botched. This revolt was begun by the Jews, and brought into Christianity by “holy epileptics” like Saint Paul, who had no honesty. “The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man.” Christianity is the most fatal and seductive lie that ever existed. No man of note has ever resembled the Christian ideal; consider for instance the heroes of Plutarch’s Lives. Christianity is to be condemned for denying the value of “pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberant spirits, splendid animalism, the instincts of war and of conquest, the deification of passion, revenge, anger, voluptuousness, adventure, knowledge.” All these things are good, and all are said by Christianity to be bad–so Nietzsche contends.
Christianity, he argues, aims at taming the heart in man, but this is a mistake. A wild beast has a certain splendour, which it loses when
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it is tamed. The criminals with whom Dostoevsky associated were better than he was, because they were more self-respecting. Nietzsche is nauseated by repentance and redemption, which he calls a folie circulaire. It is difficult for us to free ourselves
