Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter IX

by William Mackintire Salter

 

SECOND PERIOD

CHAPTER IX

GENERAL MARKS OF THE SECOND PERIOD

I

Nietzsche (now at the age of thirty-two) was not only ill, but self-distrustful—he scarcely knew whether he had a task any more or the right to one.^[1] And as a physician on occasion sends his patients into new surroundings, so he, physician and patient in one, now sends himself to a new climate, in both the spiritual and physical senses of that word.^[2] He had been living, he felt, in an atmosphere overcharged with idealism and emotion; a cold water-cure was necessary.^[3] He found himself with an uncommon desire to see men and their motives as they actually were.^[4] He also wanted to see himself more objectively—was ready to take sides against himself, if need be, and to be hard with himself; he had had his fill of illusions. Even the emotional attitude to objects in nature went against him.^[5] He understood the mental evolution of Sophocles—the aversion he in time acquired to pomp and show.^[6] In other words, the craving for knowledge, for a cool, clear view of things, became uppermost in him; ideals, ideal aims, great expectations took a subordinate place. "Unmercifully I strode over wished-for and dreamed-of things which up to that time my youth had loved, unmercifully I went on my way, the way of knowledge at any cost."^[7] "I took sides against myself, and for all that gave me pain and was hard."^[8]

All this, however, implies that though shaken and depressed he was not disheartened. The strong will for life was still in him. He afterward realized that he had simply passed from one stage of his life to another, and that the new was as natural, and, in a way, as healthful as the old. As early as 1878 he could write: "I feel as if I had recovered from an illness; I think with unspeakable sweet emotion of Mozart Requiem. I relish simple foods again."^[9] Again, after referring to his having taken sides against himself and his predilection, "A much greater piece of good fortune thereby came to me than that on which I willingly turned my back."^[10] Later he makes the general observation: "The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. Even so with spirits hindered from changing their opinions—they cease to be spirit."^[11]

 

II

It is only summing this up formally to say that Nietzsche now passes into a new period—one which, though unintelligible apart from the first, is strongly contrasted with it. It lasts, roughly speaking, five or six years (from 1876 to 1881 or 1882). The literary output of it is fragmentary; at least it is made up of fragments—we have no longer connected treatises like The Birth of Tragedy, or "The Use and Harm of History for Life." Aside from the demands of his university work, he seems unable to write connectedly. He notes down his thoughts at odd moments—often when out on his walks or climbing. As the jottings accumulate, he selects from them, works them over, gives them a semblance of order, and makes a book. The three books which belong wholly to this period, and two more, which may be said to make the transition to the next, consist of aphorisms, sometimes covering three or four pages, but for the most part so brief that several of them appear on a page. They are Human, All-too-Human (1878), Mixed Opinions and Sayings (1879), The Wanderer and his Shadow (1879),^[12] the transitional volumes being Dawn of Day (1881), Joyful Science (1882). The first of these books follows a certain order, treating successively of "First and Last Things," "The History of the Moral Sentiments," "The Religious Life," "Art and Artists," "Signs of Higher and Lower Culture," "Man in Intercourse with Others," "Wife and Child," "The State," "Man Alone with Himself"; and the two succeeding volumes follow, though less certainly, the same order. In Dawn of Day and Joyful Science, order of any kind is but slightly perceptible.

 

III

Before taking up the new views in detail, let me note a few general marks of the period. In the first place, the spirit of change is on Nietzsche. He has known slight changes before; now it is a great change. Even his perspective of moral values is somewhat altered. He does not think, for instance, so highly of loyalty as he had. "I have not the talent for being loyal, and, what is worse, not even the vanity to wish to appear so."^[13] He raises the general question whether we are irrevocably bound by vows of allegiance to a God, a prince, a party, a woman, a religious order, an artist, a thinker,—whether they were not hypothetical vows, with the unexpressed presupposition that the object to which we consecrated ourselves was really what we supposed it to be. Are we obligated, he asks, to be loyal to our errors, even when we see that by this loyalty we inflict injury on our higher self? "No, there is no law, no obligation of this sort; we must become traitors, practise disloyalty, surrender our ideals." And if it be asked why those remaining faithful to a conviction are admired, while others who change are despised, he fears the answer must be that only motives of vulgar advantage or personal fear are supposed to inspire change—a poor tribute, he thinks, to the intellectual significance of convictions.^[14] Indeed, he suspects that passion and inertia have much to do with unchangeable convictions, and that the intellect, aspiring to be cool and just, is bound to be to this extent their enemy. He puts his ideal in words like these: "From the fire [of passion] set free, we move on impelled by the intellect from opinion to opinion, through alternation of parties, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed—and yet without a feeling of guilt."^[15]

Naturally he has a fresh sense of the uncertainty of things. We would not die for our opinions, he remarks, we are not sure enough of them—though we might for the right to change them.^{[16] a} He has even the feeling of being more a wanderer than a traveler—for a traveler has a destination, and he for the time has none.^{[17] b} He tells a parable, to which he gives the title, "The worst fate of a prophet": "For twenty years he labored to convince his contemporaries of his claims—at last he succeeded; but in the meantime his opponents had also succeeded—he was no longer convinced about himself."^[18] He says (and here, too, we may be sure, he is thinking of himself): "This thinker needs no one to refute him: he suffices to that end himself."^[19] I confess that in reading him I have sometimes had the ironical reflection that he has an advantage for the student over most thinkers, in that you have only to read him far enough to find him criticising himself!—most philosophers leaving the most necessary task of criticising them to others. Somewhat in this line he suggests an unusual ethics of intellectual procedure. "We criticise a thinker more sharply when he advances a proposition that is displeasing to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do this, when his proposition is pleasing"^[20]—so easily, he means, do our likes and dislikes take us in. This is perhaps also what he means in the paradox: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than falsehoods"^[21]—too much passion, interest, will to believe lurk in "convictions." From a like point of view, he finds practical occupation dangerous. "He who has much to do keeps his general views and standpoints almost unchanged." This is true even if a person "works in the service of an idea; he will no longer test the idea itself, he has no longer the time for doing so; yes, it is against his interest to regard it as in general still discussable."^[22] And yet, he asks, "wherein does the greatness of a character consist, but in ability to take sides in favor of truth even against himself?"^[23] "Never," he charges us, "hold back something, or hide from thyself what can be urged against thy thoughts! Vow to thyself! It belongs to the first honesty of thought. Thou must every day conduct thy campaign against thyself. A victory and a fortress won are not merely thy affair, but truth's—and also thy defeat is not merely thy affair!"^[24] In much the same spirit he praises the strictness and severity of science. He thinks that one who devotes himself to scientific work does not look for approval of his success, but only for censure of his failures—like the soldier.^[25] He points out the less noble motives in scholarly procedure: "One person holds fast to a view, because he imagines that he has come on it himself, another because he has learned it with labor and is proud to have grasped it—both then from vanity."^[26]

We hear tones of irony, too. With a humiliating sense of disillusionment, he, as it were, takes it out in extravagances. He admitted in later years that in reaction from youthful enthusiasms one easily goes too far; "one is angry on account of one's youthful self-deception, as if it had been a sort of dishonest blindness, and by way of compensation is for a long time unreasonable and mistrustful toward oneself and on one's guard against all beautiful feelings."^[27] He speaks almost like a cynic at times of the part which unreason plays in human affairs,^[28] and once quotes, not without malicious pleasure, a parody, which he calls the most serious he ever heard: "In the beginning was unreason, and the unreason was with God, and was God (divine)."^[29] Particularly does he let his irony play on idealists: they put their rainbow colors on everything; if they are thrown out of their heaven, they make out of hell an ideal—they are incurable.^[30] He is disgusted with his own previous moral arrogance; he wants to have a better knowledge of what he had despised—to be juster to his own time, of which he had said so many hard things.^[31] For all this, he shows his identity with his former self in speaking of the power to lift things into the ideal as man's fairest power, though he adds that we should not let it tyrannize over us, since if we do, truth will some day leave us, declaring "thou liar from the beginning, what have I to do with thee?"^[32]

His strictly independent career now begins. Up to this time, he has been largely under the shadow of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Though never their slave, he now first stands quite on his own feet. ^c We find interesting general remarks on education, in which he puts what we receive from others in a secondary place. The young man, he notes, impatient of results, takes his picture of men and things ready-made from some philosopher or poet—he learns much thereby, but not a great deal about himself. So far as he is to be a thinker, however, he must educate himself. The process of education at others' hands is either an experiment on something unknown, or else a kind of leveling to bring the new being into harmony with prevailing habits and customs; in either case it is a task that does not belong to a thinker, but to parents and teachers, whom some one with audacious honesty has called nos ennemis naturels. It is only after one has been "educated" the longest while, that one discovers oneself—and then a thinker may well be helpful, not as a teacher, but as one who has taught himself and has experience.^[33] Nietzsche even raises the question whether in this age of books teachers of the ordinary sort are not almost dispensable.^[34] As few persons as possible, he exclaims between productive minds and those hungry and ready to receive! Let us look on the teacher as at best a necessary evil, like the tradesman—an evil to be reduced to its smallest possible proportions!^[35] Views like these, half jest, half earnest, are the reflection of his personal experience. It is not that he quite turns his back on his former teachers—after he has once found himself, he thinks there had been no harm in being among the enthusiasts and living in their equatorial zone for a while: he had in this way taken a step towards that cosmopolitanism of mind which without presumption might say, "Nothing belonging to the mind is any longer foreign to me."^[36] The very extremes of a man, he feels, may further the truth—now we see one side of a thing and now the other, we cannot very well see both at once.^[37]

I have said that now Nietzsche is first independent. The independence, however, shows itself more negatively than positively—the period is a critical rather than a constructive one. There is more analysis in it—particularly psychological analysis—than anything else. "Reflection about the human, the all-too human, or, as the scientific phrase is, the psychological view"—such is in effect a description of its first and most characteristic book.^[38] He is not so much in things and movements, as looking at them, above all at the human element in them. If he has construction in mind, it is principally in seeing what there is to construct out of—and in ruthlessly rejecting unsound material, all the vain imaginations of men. Sometimes it is called a positivistic stage—and there is a plain reaction against far flights of speculation; he wants life to rest on what is sure, demonstrable, not on the remote, indefinite, cloud-like^[39]—but he is not positivist in any party sense. So it may be called a scientific stage—for at no other time does he give so high a place to science; ^d still he does not become master in any particular branch of scientific knowledge, ^e and he thinks that the best and healthiest thing in science is, as in the mountains, the keen air that blows there.^[40]

Partly perhaps because of the new turn his mind is taking, he appreciates the English as he never had before. He even ventures to say that they are ahead of all other peoples in philosophy, natural science, history, in the field of discovery, and in the spreading of culture,^[41] and he speaks with admiration of the distinguished scholars among them who write scientific books for the people^[42]—men, we must suppose, of the type of Huxley and Tyndall. The French, too, come in for praise. We find frequent references to Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Chamfort. His style of composition is perhaps influenced by his study of these writers, for it has noticeably gained in simplicity and clearness, and is sometimes exquisitely polished—he owns himself that it has been often swollen and turgid before. He dedicates Human, All-too-Human to the memory of a Frenchman, the hundredth anniversary of whose death was about to occur, Voltaire, calling him "one of the greatest liberators of the mind."

 

IV

It is a period which Professor Ziegler calls his "leanest." Professor Riehl, on the other hand, finds it in many respects the most attractive and valuable; and Jacob Burckhardt pronounced Human, All-too-Human his "sovereign book." Much depends on the point of view. If one has above all the critical temper, if one is bent on analysis and skeptical of enthusiasm, if one distrusts metaphysics and high-soaring aims, in other words if one is a typical scholar or scientific man, the writings of this period are likely to appeal to him more than any others. Nietzsche is now anti-metaphysical, anti-mystical, anti-romantic à l'outrance. His passion for actuality makes him explore all the corners of life where the ideal throws a glamor over the real and rout it out. Or, to use a sardonic metaphor which he himself employs in a later retrospect, he lays one error after another "on ice"—with the result that it is "not refuted, but freezes." It is so, he says, with "the genius," with "the saint," with "the hero"; it is so finally with "belief," with so-called "convictions"; even "pity" cools off considerably, and "the thing in itself" freezes almost everywhere.^[43] Yet a deep-seeing poet has said,

"We all are changed by slow degrees,
All but the basis of the soul,"

and it is true of Nietzsche. Actuality is not the whole of possible existence, and the passion for actuality was never the whole nor the deepest thing in Nietzsche. Later on he came to realize this distinctly. His present phase is really one of transition—Riehl calls it an interlude.^{[44] f} All the same, we may as well attend to it for the time, as if no other were to follow—in fact be like Nietzsche himself, who at first does not know whether anything more is to come. He ventures a summary description of how men develop intellectually during their first thirty years:—Beginning with religious impulses as children and perhaps reaching the height of their impressionability at the age of ten, tending thereafter in a more scientific direction and keeping their religion in a weaker, pantheistic form, they at last leave the ideas of God, immortality, and the like quite behind, but yield to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. In course of time, however, this too becomes incredible. On the other hand, art appears to last, and for a while the metaphysics lingers as a form of art or as a transfiguring artistic mood. But the scientific sense grows ever more imperative and conducts the full-grown man to natural science and history and especially into strictest methods of thinking, while to art falls an ever milder and more modest significance.^[45] Nietzsche thinks that this is a kind of epitome of the intellectual history of humanity—it is at least, we may say, a summary of his own personal history down to and into his second period.

Nietzsche had a friend at this time—really since 1874—by the name of Paul Rée. He was a positivist of the French and English type. He had written a book, Psychological Observations, which impressed Nietzsche, and during the winter of 1876-77 they were together in Sorrento, where Rée wrote another book, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, a copy of which he presented to Nietzsche with the inscription, "To the father of this book from its most grateful mother." ^g Undoubtedly Nietzsche influenced him, and yet he as certainly influenced Nietzsche. He seems to have particularly directed Nietzsche's attention to Pascal and Voltaire and Prosper Mérimée; he was already in that world of historical study and of fine psychological analysis which Nietzsche was to make his own, and Nietzsche once humorously dubbed his new standpoint "Réealismus." Yet a radically determining influence may be doubted. ^h Nietzsche's general positivistic tendency really began as far back as when his first doubts arose as to Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of the will. He speaks, indeed, of his "new philosophy,"^[46] but he is aware that "nature makes no leaps," and says that it is the task of the biographer to remember this principle.^[47] This second period is only relatively, not absolutely distinguished from the first. ⁱ

1. Preface, § 3, to Mixed Opinions etc.
2. Preface, § 5, to ibid.
3. Werke. XI, 123, § 391.
4. Ibid., XI, 121, § 381; cf. 123, § 389.
5. Ibid., XI, 124, § 394.
6. Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 469, § 147.
7. Werke (pocket ed.), III, xxxiv.
8. Preface, § 4, to Mixed Opinions etc.
9. Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 468, § 143.
10. Ibid., IV, 441-2, § 22.
11. Dawn of Day, § 573.
12. These three books appeared in later editions in two volumes with a common title, Human, All-too-Human. I cite, however, for reasons of convenience, each one separately.
13. Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 443, § 28.
14. Human, etc., § 629.
15. Ibid., §§ 636-7.
16. The Wanderer etc., § 333.
17. Human, etc., § 638.
18. Mixed Opinions etc., § 193.
19. Ibid., § 249.
20. Human, etc., § 484.
21. Ibid., § 483.
22. Ibid., § 511.
23. Werke (pocket ed.), IV, 450, § 66.
24. Dawn of Day, § 370.
25. Joyful Science, § 293.
26. Human, etc., § 527.
27. Werke, XIV, 376-7, § 256.
28. Human, etc., § 450.
29. Mixed Opinions etc., § 22.
30. Ibid., § 23.
31. Werke, XII, 213, § 449.
32. Mixed Opinions etc., § 345.
33. The Wanderer etc., §§ 266-7.
34. Ibid., § 180.
35. Ibid., § 282.
36. Mixed Opinions etc., § 204.
37. Ibid., § 79.
38. Human, etc., § 35.
39. The Wanderer etc., §§ 202-3, 310.
40. Mixed Opinions etc., § 205.
41. Werke, XI, 136-7, § 435.
42. Mixed Opinions etc., § 184.
43. Ecce Homo, III, iii, § 1.
44. Riehl, op. cit., p. 58; cf. Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 101-2.
45. Human, etc., § 272.
46. Werke (pocket ed.), III, xxxii.
47. The Wanderer etc., § 198.