The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Energy, intellect, and pride,—these make the superman.

“Woe to the

thinker who is not the gardener but the soil of his plants!” Who is it that follows his impulses? The weakling: he lacks the power to inhibit; he is not strong enough to say No; he is a discord, a decadent. To discipline one’s self—that is the highest thing. “The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.”

To have a purpose for which one can be hard upon others, but above all upon one’s self; to have a purpose for which one will do almost anything except betray a friend,—that is the final pa...

Ye lonely ones of to-day, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people; from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise; and from it the superman.”

The triumph of Christ was the beginning of democracy; “the first Christian was in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lived and struggled unremittingly for ‘equal rights’”;

Teutonic warrior barons

they “were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and but a student’s freak had been perpetrated.” It was such men who supplied the ruling classes for Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, Italy, and Russia.

A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization, with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers,... this herd founded the State.

This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock. Just as Catholicism was mellowing

Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; “shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together.” English

Only in a land where shop-keepers and ship-keepers had multiplied to such a number as to overcome the aristocracy could democracy be fabricated; this is the gift, the Greek gift, which England has

given the modern world. Who will rescue Europe from England, and England from democracy?

Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women become men.

Only a man of intellect should hold property”;

Within fifty years these Babel governments” (the democracies of Europe) “will clash in a gigantic war for the markets of the world.”

Always and everywhere, some will be leaders and some followers; the majority will be compelled, and will be happy, to work under the intellectual direction of higher men.

The ideal society, then, would be divided into three classes: producer (farmers, prolétaires and business men), officials (soldiers and functionaires), and rulers.

There is no “accident of birth”; every birth is the verdict of nature upon a marriage; and the perfect man comes only after generations of selection and preparation; “a man’s ancestors have paid the price of what he is.”

Does this offend too much our long democratic ears? But “those races that cannot bear this philosophy are doomed; and those that regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be the masters of the world.”

But on rereading him we perceive that something of this brilliance is due to exaggeration, to an interesting but at last neurotic egotism, to an overfacile inversion of every accepted notion, the ridicule of every virtue, the praise of every vice; he takes, we discover, a sophomore’s delight in shocking; we conclude that it is easy to be interesting when one has no prejudices in favor of morality. These dogmatic assertions, these unmodified generalizations, these prophetic repetitions, these contradictions—of others not more than of himself—reveal a mind that has lost its balance, and hovers on the edge of madness. At last this brilliance tires us out and exhausts our nerves, like whips upon the flesh, or loud emphasis in conversation.

Nietzsche does not prove, he announces and reveals; he wins us with his imagination rather than with his logic; he offers us not a philosophy merely, nor yet only a poem, but a new faith, a new hope, a new religion.

the Romantic movement, the high tide of the Romantic stream; he liberated and exalted the “will” and the “genius” of Schopenhauer from all social restraint, as Wagner liberated and exalted the passion that had torn at its classic bonds in the Sonata Pathétique and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. He was the last great scion of the lineage of Rousseau.

Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato.

Of all Nietzsche’s books, Zarathustra is safest from criticism, partly because it is obscure, and partly because its inexpugnable merits dwarf all fault-finding.

Every critic has seen the contradiction between the bold preachment of egoism (Zarathustra “proclaims the Ego whole and holy, and selfishness blessed”—an unmistakable echo of Stirner) and the appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice in the preparation and service of the superman. But who, reading this philosophy, will classify himself as servant, and not as superman?

And there is no great call to complain that morality is a weapon used by the weak to limit the strong; the strong are not too deeply impressed by it, and make rather clever use of it in turn: most moral codes are imposed from above rather than from below; and the crowd praises and blames by prestige imitation. It is well, too, that humility should be occasionally

It remains that he opened a new vista into Greek drama and philosophy; that he showed at the outset the seeds of romantic decadence in the music of Wagner; that he analyzed our human nature with a subtlety as sharp as a surgeon’s knife, and perhaps as salutary; that he laid bare some hidden roots of morality as no other modern thinker had done;