The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Nietzsche was the child of Darwin and the brother of Bismarck.

in this battle we call life, what we need is not goodness but strength, not humility but pride, not altruism but resolute intelligence; that equality and democracy are against the grain of selection and survival; that not masses but geniuses are the goal of evolution; that not “justice” but power is the arbiter of all differences and all destinies.—So it seemed to Friedrich Nietzsche.

The growing military and industrial vigor of this new Germany needed a voice; the arbitrament of war needed a philosophy to justify it. Christianity would not justify it, but Darwinism could. Given a little audacity, and the thing could be done.

Nietzsche had the audacity, and became the voice.

He attacked Christianity because there was so much of its moral spirit in him;

the serenity of the sage and the calm of the balanced mind were never his.

he came to worship the soldier because his health would not permit him to become one.

instead of becoming a warrior he became a Ph.D.

Here,” he wrote, “you have the state, of shameful origin; for the greater part of men a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to courage and uplifted to heroism.”333 At Frankfort, on his way to the front,

he saw a troop of cavalry passing with magnificent clatter and display through the town; there and then, he says, came the perception, the vision, out of which was to grow his entire philosophy. “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”

Ever afterward he had the nerves of a Shelley and the stomach of a Carlyle; the soul of a girl under the armor of a warrior.

The Greeks were not the cheerful and optimistic people whom we meet with in modern rhapsodies about them; they knew the stings of life intimately, and it’s tragic brevity. When Midas asked Silenus what fate is best for a man, Silenus answered: “Pitiful race of a day, children of accidents and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were better left unheard? The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, to be nothing. The second best is to die early.”

But the Greeks overcame the gloom of their disillusionment with the brilliance of their art: out of their own suffering they made the spectacle of the drama, and found that “it is only as an esthetic phenomenon,” as an object of artistic contemplation or reconstruction, “that existence and the world appear justified.”

“The sublime is the artistic subjugation of the awful.” Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; “tragic optimism” is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life. “Tragedy itself is the proof of the fact that the Greeks were not pessimists.” The days when th...

Under the influence of Socrates, Plato the athlete became an esthete, Plato the dramatist became a logician, an enemy of passion, a deporter of poets, a “pre-Christian Christian,” an epistemologist.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic. In its youth Greece produced Homer and Æschylus; in its decay it gave us Euripides—the logician turned dramatist, the rationalist destroying myth and symbol, the sentimentalist destroying the tragic optimism of the masculine age, the friend of Socrates who replaces the Dionysian chorus with an Apollonian galaxy of dialecticians and orators.

No wonder the Delphic oracle of Apollo had named Socrates the wisest of the Greeks, and Euripides the wisest after him; and no wonder that “the unerring instinct of Aristophanes... comprised Socrates and Euripides... in the same feeling of hatred, and saw in them the symptoms of a degenerate culture.”

“Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture,...—namely, German music,... in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.”

The German spirit has too long reflected passively the Apollonian art of Italy and France; let the German people realize that their own instincts are sounder than these decadent cultures; let them make a Reformation in music as in religion, pouring the wild vigor of Luther again into art and life. Who knows but that out of the war-throes of the German nation another age of heroes dawns, and that out of the spirit of music tragedy may be reborn?

morality, as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of the evolution theory; and that the function of life is to bring about “not the betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types,” but “the creation of genius,” the development and elevation of superior personalities.

The central theme even of this laudatory essay boded no good for Wagner: “The world has been Orientalized long enough; and men now yearn to be Hellenized.” But Nietzsche already knew that Wagner was half Semitic.

“I had had visions of a drama overspread with a symphony, a form growing out of the Lied. But the alien appeal of the opera drew Wagner irresistibly in the other direction.”

Parsifal. It was to be an exaltation of Christianity, pity, and fleshless love, and a world redeemed by a “pure fool,” “the fool in Christ.” Nietzsche turned away without a word, and never spoke to Wagner thereafter. “It is impossible for me to recognize greatness which is not united with candor and sincerity towards one’s self. The moment I make a discovery of this sort, a man’s achievements count for absolutely nothing with me.” He preferred Siegfried the rebel to Parsifal the saint, and could not forgive Wagner for coming to see in Christianity a moral value and beauty far outweighing its theological defects. In The Case of Wagner he lays about him with neurotic fury:

Wagner flatters every nihilistic Buddhist instinct, and disguises it in music; he flatters every kind of Christianity and every religious form and expression of decadence... Richard Wagner,... a decrepit and desperate romantic, collapsed suddenly before the Holy Cross. Was there no German then with eyes to see, with pity in his conscience to bewail, this horrible spectacle? Am I then the only one he caused to suffer?... And yet I was one of the most corrupt Wagnerians... Well, I am the child of this age, just like Wagner,—i.e., a decadent; but I am conscious of it; I defended myself against it.

There was so much of Plato in Nietzsche; he feared that art would unteach men to be hard; being tender-minded, he supposed that all the world was like himself,—dangerously near to practising Christianity.

Promise me,” he said to his sister, “that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utter falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer protect myself; and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.”

A slight exaggeration!—but assuredly it is one of the great books of the nineteenth century. Yet Nietzsche had a bitter time getting it into print; the first part was delayed because the publisher’s presses were busy with an order for 500,000 hymn-books, and then by a stream of anti-Semitic pamphlets; and the publisher refused to print the last part at all, as quite worthless from the point of view of shekels; so that the author had to pay for its publication himself. Forty copies of the book were sold; seven were given away; one acknowledged it; no one praised it. Never was a man so much alone.

Live dangerously,” he preaches. “Erect your cities beside Vesuvius. Send out your ships to unexplored seas. Live in a state of war.”

“I conjure you, my brethren, remain faithful to earth, and do not believe those who speak unto you of superterrestrial hopes! Poisoners they are, whether they know it or not.”

Zarathustra complains that “nobody knoweth any longer how to revere,” and he calls himself “the most pious of all those who believe not in God.” He longs for belief, and pities “all who, like myself, suffer from the great loathing, for whom the old God died and no new God yet lieth in cradles and napkins.”

I love those who do not seek beyond the stars for a reason to perish and be sacrificed, but who sacrifice themselves to earth in order that earth may someday become superman’s...

After the superman comes Eternal Recurrence. All things will return, in precise detail, and an infinite number of times; even Nietzsche will return, and this Germany of blood and iron and sack-cloth and ashes, and all the travail of the human mind from ignorance to Zarathustra.

Zarathustra became for Nietzsche a Gospel whereon his later books were merely commentaries.

Because of his failing eyes he wrote henceforth no books, but only aphorisms.

Here then were two contradictory valuations of human behavior, two ethical standpoints and criteria: a Herren-Moral and a Herden-Moral—a morality of masters and a morality of the herd. The former was the accepted standard in classical antiquity, especially among the Romans; even for the ordinary Roman, virtue was virtus—manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. But from Asia, and especially from the Jews in the days of their political subjection, came the other standard; subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism—which is an appeal for help. Under this herd-morality love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace; strength was replaced by cunning, open by secret revenge, sternness by pity, initiative by imitation, the pride of honor by the whip of conscience. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic.345 It was the eloquence of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus, that made the view of a subject class an almost universal ethic; the “world” and the “flesh” became synonyms of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue.

This valuation was brought to a peak by Jesus: with him every man was of equal worth, and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism; progress was now defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of progressive equalization and vulgarization, in terms of decadence and descending life. The final stage in this decay is the exaltation of pity and self-sacrifice, the sentimental comforting of criminals, “the inability of a society to excrete.”

Humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.

Philosophical systems are shining mirages”; what we see is not the long-sought truth, but the reflection of our own desires. “The philosophers all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic;... whereas in fact a prejudicial proposition, idea or ‘suggestion,’ which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.”

In the uncorrupted vigor of the master soul, desire is its own justification; and conscience, pity or remorse can find no entrance. But so far has the Judaeo-Christian-democratic point-of-view prevailed in modern times, that even the strong are now ashamed of their strength and their health, and begin to seek “reasons.”

“The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.” The strong are no longer permitted to exercise their strength; they must become as far as possible like the weak; “goodness is to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.” Has not Kant, that “great Chinaman of Königsberg,” proved that men must never be used as a means? Consequently the instincts of the strong—to hunt, to fight, to conquer and to rule—are introverted into self-laceration for lack of outlet; they beget asceticism and the “bad conscience”;

The ultimate ethic is biological; we must judge things according to their value for life; we need a physiological “transvaluation of all values.”

The decadent says, “Life is worth nothing”; let him rather say, “I am worth nothing.”

“Not mankind, but superman is the goal.”

The very last thing a sensible man would undertake would be to improve mankind: mankind does not improve, it does not even exist—it is an abstraction; all that exists is a vast ant-hill of individuals.

the aim of all the experiments is not the happiness of the mass but the improvement of the type.

he came to think of his superman as the superior individual rising precariously out of the mire of mass mediocrity, and owing his existence more to deliberate breeding and careful nurture than to the hazards of natural selection. For the biological process is biased against the exceptional individual; nature is most cruel to her finest products; she loves rather, and protects, the average and the mediocre; there is in nature a perpetual reversion to type, to the level of the mass,—a recurrent mastery of the best by the most. The superman can survive only by human selection, by eugenic foresight and an ennobling education.

The best should marry only the best; love should be left to the rabble.

Without good birth, nobility is impossible. “Intellect alone does not ennoble; on the contrary, something is always needed to ennoble intellect. What then is needed? Blood... (I do not refer here to the prefix ‘Lords,’ or the ‘Almanac de Gotha’: this is a parenthesis for donkeys).” But given good birth and eugenic breeding, the next factor in the formula of the superman is a severe school; where perfection will be exacted as a matter of course, not even meriting praise; where there will be few comforts and many responsibilities; where the body will be taught to suffer in silence, and the will may learn to obey and to command. No libertarian nonsense!—no weakening of the physical and moral spine by indulgence and “freedom”! And yet a school where one will learn to laugh heartily; philosophers should be graded according to their capacity for laughter; “he who strideth across the highest mountains laugheth at all tragedies.” And there will be no moralic acid in this education of the superman; an asceticism of the will, but no condemnation of the flesh. “Cease not to dance, ye sweet girls! No spoil-sport hath come unto you with an evil eye,... no enemy of girls with beautiful ankles.” Even a superman may have a taste for beautiful ankles.

What is good? All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad (schlecht)? All that comes from weakness.”

Even revolution is good; not in itself, for nothing could be more unfortunate than the supremacy of the masses; but because times of strife bring out the latent greatness of individuals who before had insufficient stimulus or opportunity; out of such chaos comes the dancing star; out of the turmoil and nonsense of the French Revolution, Napoleon;