# Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter III

CHAPTER III
HIS "MEGALOMANIA," PERIODS, CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW, SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
I
Nietzsche is sometimes charged with "megalomania." It must be admitted that he had, at least in sanguine moments, a high opinion of his place in the world of thought, and we should undoubtedly find it more becoming if he had left the expression of such an opinion—supposing there was ground for it—to others. The language is most offensive in private memoranda, in confidential letters to friends, and in the autobiographical notes, entitled Ecce Homo, which at first were not meant for publication and have only been given to the light since his death; still it occurs also in offensive form in a pamphlet and a small book which he published in the last year of his life, "The Case of Wagner," and Twilight of the Idols. Doubtless it would be fairer to Nietzsche to cite the various utterances in the connection in which they respectively belong, or at least at the end of the book after a general survey of his thought had been given, but it is convenient to take the matter up now.
I begin with the utterances (I take only the more extreme ones) which he himself gave to the public—only noting that he called "The Case of Wagner" and Twilight of the Idols his "recreations," and that in general they contain, as M. Taine remarked in a letter to him, "audaces et finesses," which we need not take quite literally. In one of the passages, after confessing that he is worse read in Germany than anywhere else and is somewhat indifferent to present fame anyway, he says that what he is concerned for is to "get a little immortality" and that the aphorism and the sentence, in which he is "the first master among Germans," are forms of "eternity"; his "ambition is to say in ten propositions what every one else says in a book—what every one else does not say in a book. ​In the same paragraph he speaks of his having given mankind "the deepest book it possesses, namely Zarathustra," and he adds that he is about to give it "the most independent" (probably referring to The Antichristian). In another passage he says generally that he has given the Germans their "deepest books"—and adds mockingly, "reason enough for the Germans not understanding a word of them." In still another place he urges that German philologists and even Goethe had not comprehended the wonderful Greek phenomenon, covered by the name of Dionysus—that he was the first to penetrate to its interior significance.
Turning now to the material published since his death, we find him for one thing daring to put Aristotle himself in the wrong as to the essential meaning of tragedy—"I have first discovered the tragic." Even as early as 1881, he confided to his sister his belief that he was the topmost point of moral reflection and labor in Europe. He reiterates the belief to Brandes in 1888, saying that he fancies himself a capital event in the crisis of valuations; to Strindberg he even says, "I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts." In Ecce Homo he becomes almost lyric in his confidence: "No one before me knew the right way, the way upwards; first from me on are there again hopes, tasks, ways of culture to be prescribed—I am their happy messenger." He notes of a certain day (30 September, 1888): "Great victory; a seventh day; leisurely walk of a god along the Po." He feels that he has had, and has been, an extraordinary fortune, and writes with an extraordinary abandon and an almost childish irresponsibility—explaining who he is, how he has come to be what he is, why he has written such good books, and so on. It is as if he were somebody else and he were telling us about him. Let one note the account of the extraordinary mental conditions out of which the first part of Zarathustra ​arose. They were like what prophets and revealers of divine mysteries may be imagined to have experienced in the past; most persons with such experiences would probably be turned into "believers" forthwith. Nietzsche, however, is cool, objective, analytical in describing what he has undergone; it appears simply as a happy, supreme moment in his psychological history—the account may well become a kind of classic for the scientific student of religious phenomena. Indeed, Nietzsche now makes special claims for himself as a psychologist—he is one "who has not his like." In speaking of the seductive, poisonous influence of Christian morality on thinkers, inasmuch as they were kept by it from penetrating into the sources whence it sprung, he says, "Who in general among philosophers before me was psychologist and not rather the antithesis of one, a 'higher kind of swindler,' an 'idealist'?" He indicates similar feeling about himself as a thinker in general—ranging himself with Voltaire, whom he calls, in contrast with his successors, a "grand-seigneur of the mind." German philosophers in particular he finds not clean and straight in their thinking—they never went through a seventeenth century of hard self-criticism as the French had; they are all Schleiermachers—and "the first straight mind in the history of mind, one in whom truth comes to judgment on the counterfeits of four millenniums," should not be reckoned among them (I need not say that he means himself). He is convinced of his future influence. He is "the most formidable man that ever was," though this does not exclude his becoming "the most beneficent." He speaks of his sufferings, and adds with a touch of humor, "one pays dear for being immortal; one dies several times while one lives." He looks forward to institutions where there will be living and teaching as he understands living and teaching—"perhaps there will even be chairs for the interpretation of Zarathustra." His thankfulness to Sils-Maria (where Zarathustra was first conceived) would fain give it "an immortal name." Little signs of vanity escape him. ​Women, he says, like him—all but the unwomanly kind; people who never heard his name or the word philosophy are fond of him—the old fruit-vendors in Turin, for example, who pick out their sweetest grapes for him. He is pleased with the idea of his being of Polish descent (Poles are to him "the French among the Slavs"). He is flattered at the thought of devoted readers; "people have said that it was impossible to lay down a book of mine—I even disturbed the night's rest." His anticipations of the future border on the grotesque. His Transvaluation [of all Values] will be like a "crashing thunderbolt." "In two years," he wrote Brandes in 1888, "we shall have the whole earth in convulsions."
Such is what Professor Pringle-Pattison calls Nietzsche's "colossal egotism"—I know no worse instances; he thinks it attained proportions not to be distinguished from mania. It may be so, but one or two things should be borne in mind. The first is Nietzsche's addiction to strong language in general—particularly toward the close of his life. For instance, "Where has God gone? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I; we are all murderers, etc."—it is his strong picturesque way of stating what he conceived to be the essential fact as to the course of modern philosophical thought, beginning with Kant. He amplifies the picture of coming "convulsions" by speaking of "earthquakes," "displacement of mountains and valleys." He feels so foreign to everything German, that "the nearness of a German hinders his digestion." He has a "horrible fear" that he may some day be taken for a saint, but he would rather be a Hanswurst—"perhaps I am a Hanswurst." Again, "I am no man, I am dynamite." He even says to his friend and helper, Peter Gast, "I consider you ​better and more talented than I am." Plainly we have to make some allowance for one who speaks in ways like these. Secondly, he also had moods quite different from those of "colossal egotism." In the letter to Brandes, in which he spoke of himself as a capital event in the crisis of valuations, he immediately added, "but that may be an error—more than that, a stupidity—I wish to be obliged to believe nothing about myself." He had doubts about Zarathustra; when the first recognition of it came to his knowledge, he wrote to Gast, "So my life is not a failure after all—and just now least of all when I most believed it." At another time he confessed to Gast that there trailed about in his heart an opposition to the whole Zarathustra-creation. As we shall see later, he puts forth almost all his distinctive views tentatively, and is rarely without skeptical reserves.
The fact is that Nietzsche was not naturally a conceited being, and how he developed such a seemingly overweening self-regard, and what was its exact nature, is an interesting psychological problem. He wrote an old student friend, Freiherr von Seydlitz, who was on the point of visiting him in Sorrento in 1877, "Heaven knows you will find a very simple man who has no great opinion of himself;" yet to the same person ten years later he used language about as strong as that already quoted—though adding "between ourselves." How is the development to be explained? So far as I can make out, the order of psychological fact was something like the following:
Increasingly with the years Nietzsche became a lonely man—physically, and above all spiritually. His old masters—Schopenhauer and Wagner—had failed him, and no one came to take their place. It is a mistake to think that he wished no master. His early feeling is shown in "Schopenhauer as Educator," and as late as 1885 he wrote his sister, "I confront alone an immense problem: it is as if I were lost in a forest, a primeval one. I need help. I need disciples, I need a master. It would be so sweet to obey! If I were lost on a mountain, ​I should obey a man who knew the mountain; sick, I should obey a physician; and if I encountered a man who could enlighten me on the worth of our moral ideas, I should listen to him, I should follow him; but I do not find any one—no disciples, and masters still less … I am alone." He says elsewhere, "Why do I not find among the living men who see higher than I and have to look down on me? Is it only that I have made a poor search? And I have so great a longing for such!" Even his thought of a disciple is peculiar. He writes to Peter Gast (sending him a manuscript), "Read me with more distrust than you ordinarily do, say to me simply, this will go, that that will not go, this pleases me, why that does not, etc., etc." Once he makes a disillusioned thinker say, "I listened for an echo [i.e., some real reproduction of his thought] and heard only praise;" but even praise was rare for Nietzsche. So far as his later books were noticed at all, they were put down as "eccentric, pathological, psychiatric," and as a rule they were ignored. Even rare men like Burckhardt and Taine could not really follow them—they had not, he felt, the same inner need with him, the same will. Those who had been friends from youth up became, for one reason and another, and not always without his fault, estranged. He writes his sister, "A deep man has need of friends, at least, unless he has a God: and I have neither God nor friends. Ah, my sister, those whom you call such, they were so in other times—but now?" He notes down privately: "No longer does any one live who loves me; how should I still love life!" This was after the publication of Zarathustra, when he also says, "After such a call from the deepest soul, to hear no word of answer—that is a fearful experience, from which the toughest might go to pieces: it has taken me out of all ties with living men." So (probably in the last year of his life), "It is now ten years— ​no sound any longer reaches me—a land without rain." He feels shut up, cut off. "How can I communicate myself? … When shall I come out of the cave into the open? I am the most hidden of all hidden things." No longer can he be "eloquent," he is like a cave-bear or hermit and talks only with himself, his ideas are acquiring a sort of twilight-color and an odor of buried things and of mold. When he comes to Leipzig in 1886, he strikes his old friend, Erwin Rohde, as something almost uncanny: "it would seem as if he came from a country where no man lived."
And yet he does not wish to take his experiences too tragically, does not mean to complain; his way, he is aware, is not a way for most, it is too dangerous; and, as men and things are in Germany at the time, not even the few he hoped for have ears for him, their interests being elsewhere. He tries manfully to accept the situation, though not without some contempt for the general milieu that makes it necessary to do so. Although he has longed and waited for a strong heart and neck on which he could for an hour at least unload his burden, he is now ready for the last (or first) lesson of life-wisdom: to cease expecting; and for the second: to be courteous, to be modest, thenceforth to endure everybody, endure everything—in short, to endure yet a little more than he had endured before. He even thinks that solitude may be useful for him—suspecting that, if a man can endure it, it tests him even more than sickness, i.e., hardens him, makes him great, if he has any capacities in that direction. He had said in Zarathustra, "Away from the market-place and fame, all that is great betakes itself; away from the market-place and fame, the creators of new values have always dwelt." Even the kindness of those who pity the solitary thinker and wish to make him more comfortable, to "save" him from himself, may be mistaken. Just to be himself and apart from the world, may be his highest duty to the world. Not to lead his time, or take a part in its conflicts, but to turn away from it and develop the idea of a ​new time, may be the greatest thing. Nietzsche had once put the idea in poetic form:
"Destined, O star, for radiant path No claim on thee the darkness hath! Roll on in bliss through this our age! Its trouble ne'er shall thee engage! In furthest world thy beams shall glow: Pity, as sin, thou must not know! Be pure: that duty's all you owe."
At moments he could almost exult—at least he could quote the beautiful words of Isaiah, "exultabit solitudo et florebit quasi lilium"; and he even said (though, I fear, with something of bravado), "One has no right to have nerves … to suffer from solitude. For my part, I have never suffered save from the multitude."
And yet this "solitary" was bound by the most intimate ties to his kind, and one might almost say that love for his kind was final motive of all his thinking. What was the path of greatness for mankind?—that was his supreme question. How he worked out an answer, and what the answer was, it will be the effort of this book to explain. But with an answer he could not keep silent about it. He had to speak —the burden was on him. Yes, it was his burden,—no one else felt it, no one else gave the answer credence. Hence an acutely personal note in speaking of it. Sometimes a message sums up the aspirations of an age: then the individual communicating it is unimportant. Sometimes, however, a message goes counter to an age, or at least speaks to deaf ears; then the individual becomes of capital importance. Nietzsche never separates himself from his word; but in the circumstances the word lent gravity to him. It was well, then, that men should know authoritatively of him, should understand how his wonderful fortune had befallen him, should be let into his inner thought and impulses. As if aware of this, he speaks freely to one or two friends, and he writes the extraordinary autobiographical notes, Ecce Homo. This last was immediately only for his sister's eyes, who was at the time in South ​America. In a letter to her he says, "I write in this golden autumn [1888], the most beautiful I have ever known, a retrospect of my life, for myself alone. No one shall read it with the exception of a certain good lama, when she comes across the sea to visit her brother. There is nothing in it for Germans.… I mean to bury the manuscript and hide it; let it turn to mold, and when we are all mold, it may have its resurrection. Perhaps then Germans will be worthier of the great present, which I mean to make them." Afterward he changed his mind, and decided to print the book. Without doubt, it is a self-glorification, but the glorifying is because of the glory of his message and in view of the peculiar and tragic situation in which he found himself. To how slight an extent he cared for himself otherwise is shown in a memorandum: "For my son Zarathustra I demand reverence, and it shall be permitted only to the fewest to listen to him. About me however, 'his father,' you may laugh, as I myself do. Or, to make use of a rhyme that stands over my house-door, and put it all in a word:
"I live in my own house, have nowise imitated anybody else's and laughed at every master, who has not laughed at himself."
It is as if he said, "Think of me as you will, but revere my work." Indeed, after finishing Ecce Homo, he tells a friend that now that he has got the record down, people had better not concern themselves any further about him, but about the things for which he lives (derentwegen ich da bin). The fact is, the obtrusion of self was against his instincts. For long years, he testifies, he had not obtruded even his problems on the men whom he met, and now he confesses that his habits and still more the pride of his instincts revolt against writing about himself as he does in Ecce Homo—this though he says elsewhere that a great man may be proud enough to be unashamed even of his vanity.
Hence, though vanity and personal resentment may have ​had their part in inducing him to write this strange book, the main motives were deeper. He wanted to make clear who one with his extraordinary fortune was. "People confuse me," he says elsewhere, adding that it would be a great service if some one would defend and define him against these confusions; but, as things were, he had to come to his own help. "Hear me!" he says in the preface, "I am so and so. Above all things do not confuse me with some one else! I will only add that though he magnifies himself, it is not as a superman, or as a messiah, or as the founder of a religion, but simply as a bearer of ideas and messenger of a new culture. Indeed, he sharply marks himself off from prophets and founders of religions. His underlying view is different. Men with great thoughts and inspirations in the past have usually attributed these to a Not-themselves, and masked their pride, or lost it, in humility. The divine in man they put outside him. "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto God be the glory," they said in substance. They may have been right, but Nietzsche thought otherwise. To him the ideas that came to him were his very self, the projection of his inmost will, and he, his self or will, was the outcome of a long course of purely natural evolution. This does not mean that he was without piety and reverence, but it was a natural and human piety, the reverence was self-reverence. At the same time the ideas might be detached from him individually and live after his self was gone. Indeed, to make them live on, to have them become seeds of a new human culture, was the practical meaning of his aim. Whether he overestimated his ideas and himself is another question. Perhaps he did. But the charge of megalomania or "colossal egotism" does not dispose of him. Others—particularly founders of religions—have spoken of themselves in far more swelling language than Nietzsche ever used; but we do not object to it, if we find it well-based—indeed, we do not call it "colossal egotism" at all.
II
Nietzsche's intellectual history falls, roughly speaking, into three periods. In the first, he is under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner—the influence of the latter might be almost called a spell. It is the time of his discipleship—lasting approximately to 1876. In the second, he more or less frees himself from these influences. It is the period of his emancipation—and of his coolest and most objective criticism of men and things (including himself)—continuing to 1881 or 1882. In the third, his positive constructive doctrine more and more appears. The early idealistic instinct reasserts itself, but purified by critical fire. It is the period of independent creation. This division into periods is more or less arbitrary (particularly so are the dates assigned); something of each period is in every other; but change, movement, to a greater or less extent, existed in his life, and the "three periods" serve roughly to characterize it.
III
Beneath all changes, however, there were, as already hinted, certain constant points of view, and it may be of service to the reader to mention some of them briefly in advance. There was, for example, an underlying pessimism—so it would be ordinarily called—and yet with it increasingly a practical optimism. Nietzsche felt keenly man's imperfection—more than once he even speaks of mankind as a "field of ruins." One thinks of John Henry Newman's readiness to credit the "fall of man" on general principles, so little did man's state agree with the notion of something Perfect from which he came. Nietzsche's sense of the perfect, however, simply shows itself in projecting a possible semi-Divine outcome of humanity. This, indeed, becomes a supreme and governing idea with him. From its standpoint the callings of men and men themselves are judged. Learning and science are not ends in themselves, nor do the rank and file of human beings exist on their own account. The scholar or man of science is a tool in the hands of one with a sense of the supreme values, the philosopher, ​and slavery for the mass in some form or other is a condition and basis of higher culture. Culture, as something beyond a state of nature, is ever the ideal; and rule, not laisser faire, is the way to it. It is time to attempt an organization of mankind with the higher end in view. Present national or racial aims must be transcended—a human aim must overtop them; and a united Europe is the first step. Yet progress, all real social change, must be slow. "Everything illegitimate is against my nature," Nietzsche once said; he even characterized the "revolutionary" as a form of the "unreal." A new philosophy is the first requirement, and war, if it comes, must be for ideas. The general standpoint of Nietzsche might be described as aristocratic—Georg Brandes called it "aristocratic radicalism," and Nietzsche said that it was the most intelligent word about him which he had yet heard, though I cannot help thinking that Professor Höffding's phrase, "radical aristocraticism," more nearly hits the mark.
I may add that Nietzsche's mood at the end as at the beginning was one of hope. He criticised Goethe rarely, but he did so once in this way. The aged man had summed up his experience of life by saying, "As children, we are sensualists; as lovers, we are idealists, who attach to the loved object qualities which are not really there; then love wavers, and before we are aware of it, we are skeptics; the remainder of life is indifferent, we let it go as it will, and end as quietists, as the Hindu philosophers did also." Nietzsche quotes the passage and adds, "So speaks Goethe: was he right? If so, how little reason would there be in becoming as old, as reasonable as Goethe! Rather were it well to learn from the Greeks their judgment on old age—for they hated growing old more than death, and wished to die, when they felt that they were commencing to be reasonable in that fashion." He had been referring to his early attempts to win disciples, and his "impatient hopes"; and "now—after an hundred years according to my reckoning of time!—I am still not yet old enough to have lost all hope"—what was gone was his impatience. It was a noble mood—for his hope was ultimately a hope for the world; so far he too obeyed "the voice at eve obeyed at prime."
IV
Nietzsche felt that he belonged to a spiritual line. He was grateful to those of his own time or century who had influenced him, and to the great spirits of the past whose blood was kindred to his own—indeed he was so conscious of being well-born in this respect, that he did not feel the need of fame. His ancestry he designates differently at different times. Once he speaks of four pairs of names: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. At another time he mentions Zarathustra, Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau. At still another, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. It is interesting to note that the most constant names are Spinoza and Goethe, the next most constant Plato. Kant is not mentioned. This cannot mean that Kant had not influenced him, though more negatively than otherwise, and perhaps principally through Schopenhauer and Friedrich Albert Lange; with Kant's theoretic standpoint he was far more in harmony than with Plato's, but Plato's aristocratic practical philosophy appealed to him as Kant's democratic, Rousseau-born ethics did not. Nietzsche confessed that he almost loved Pascal, who had instructed him unendingly; but he thought that Christianity had corrupted his noble intellect, though if he had lived thirty years longer, he might have turned on Christianity as he had earlier on the Jesuits.
* ↑ Briefe, III, 206.
* ↑ Twilight etc., ix, § 51.
* ↑ "The Case of Wagner," 2nd postscript.
* ↑ Twilight etc., x, § 4.
* ↑ Ecce Homo, I, § 3; Will to Power, § 1029.
* ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), VI, xxiv.
* ↑ Briefe, III, 285.
* ↑ Ecce Homo, III, ix, § 2; cf. IV, § 1.
* ↑ Ibid., III, ix, § 3.
* ↑ Ibid., III, iv, § 3.
* ↑ Ibid., III, § 5.
* ↑ Ibid., IV, § 6.
* ↑ Ibid., III, iii, § 1.
* ↑ Ibid., III, x, § 3.
* ↑ Ibid., IV, § 2.
* ↑ Ibid., III, vi, § 5.
* ↑ Ibid., III, § 1.
* ↑ Ibid., III, ix, § 3.
* ↑ Ibid., III, § 5.
* ↑ Ibid., III, § 2.
* ↑ Ibid., III, § 3.
* ↑ Ibid., III, x, § 4; cf. Briefe, IV, 426.
* ↑ Briefe, III, 321; cf. Ecce Homo, III, x, § 4.
* ↑ A. S. Pringle-Pattison, Man's Place in the Cosmos (2nd ed.), pp. 284-5.
* ↑ Joyful Science, § 125.
* ↑ Ecce Homo, IV, § 1.
* ↑ Ibid., II, § 5
* ↑ Ibid., IV, § 1.
* ↑ Ibid., IV, § 1
* ↑ Briefe, IV, 26.
* ↑ Ibid., IV, 150.
* ↑ So F. Rittelmeyer, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion, p. 176.
* ↑ Sect. 2.
* ↑ I cannot locate this passage in the Briefe, and must rely on D. Halévy, La vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, p. 314; cf. Genealogy of Morals, III, § 27.
* ↑ Werke, XII, 219, § 466; cf. XIV, 358–9, § 223.
* ↑ Again I must rely on Halévy, op. cit., p. 334.
* ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 99.
* ↑ Briefe, I, 480, 495–6.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 305, § 133.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 1040.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 355, § 219.
* ↑ Ibid., 357, § 221; 359, § 225.
* ↑ Ibid., 356-9.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 971.
* ↑ Cf. Werke, XIV, 394.
* ↑ I, xii.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 985.
* ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), VI, 56 (the translation is by Thomas Common).
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 414, § 297 (quoting Isaiah, xxxv, 1).
* ↑ Ecce Homo, II, § 10.
* ↑ Werke, XV, x.
* ↑ Ibid., XIV, 410.
* ↑ Briefe, I, 538.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 350, § 208; 412, § 289.
* ↑ See the preface.
* ↑ Will to Power, § 1009.
* ↑ Cf. Briefe, IV, 172, and Meyer, op. cit., p. 384.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 360, § 226.
* ↑ Ecce Homo, preface, § 4; cf. Dr. Paneth's remark, quoted in note to Chapter XIII, at the end of this book.
* ↑ "Schopenauer as Educator," sect. 6, Will to Power, § 713.
* ↑ Briefe, III, 275.
* ↑ Op. cit., p. 160.
* ↑ Werke, XIV, 381.
* ↑ Werke, XII, 216, § 456.
* ↑ Mixed Opinions, etc., § 408.
* ↑ Werke, XII, 216-7, § 456.
* ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), VII, 491, § 57.