NIETZSCHE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY.

(By R. E. White).

AN ANALYSIS.

I.

Recently in Perth a small gathering of thoughtful men and women met to hear an exposition of Nietzsche's philosophy, by a gentleman who had spent the last three years in studying it, and who was an ardent exponent of it.

I had the honour to be present, and found the occasion a most impressive one, for it was evident that Nietzsche's doctrine has a very strong appeal to the intellectuals, and promises to be a potent factor in moulding the thought and influencing the actions of the future. Even to-day, though his teachings are intensely revolutionary, and though they have gained wide publicly only during the last few years, it is difficult to exaggerate his influence. Already he has been eagerly discussed in a thousand books and pamphlets, and many of our popular authors are more or less swayed by him. We have long since read several of his very difficult books, but since the meeting referred to, I have diligently sought to grasp the basic principles of the new philosophy and to form my own conclusions as to its truth or falseness. There are others, I feel sure, even in this small community, who are also earnestly studying the subject and finding difficulty in forming their judgments, and such may be interested in hearing my testimony.

Besides the special interest it may have for philosophical and sociological students, a much wider audience should be interested owing to the fact that it has been widely and warmly debated whether or not Nietzsche was a factor in causing this frightful war. With your permission I will therefore attempt a brief analysis of Nietzsche's doctrine. I find this a very difficult task owing to the erratic, unsympathetic, and often contradictory nature of his writings.

He was also very discursive, and utterly lacked method. Nevertheless, behind the tropical profusion, of his language there are certain root ideas which distinguish him from all other writers, and mark him as a radical and revolutionary thinker, and it is these root ideas I will endeavour to expose. His works throughout are violently antagonistic to our religious, moral, social, and political systems, but his most violent antipathy was concentrated on Christianity, which he considered the root evil of this civilisation. Back of all his contradictions and eccentricities was a dominant idea, and a consistent viewpoint, and the essence of it will be found in his theory of evolution.

Of course I am not suggesting there was any novelty in the mere fact that he was an evolutionist, for so are we all nowadays; nor even in that he extended the theory of evolution to embrace the moral sphere, for most philosophers and psychologists do that also. It was in his definition of the dynamic of progress that he broke new ground and propounded his startling doctrine. He repudiated Darwin's doctrine of struggle for existence and natural selection and proclaimed that of the will to power in lieu of the will to live.

In all organisms, from the microcosm to the nation he saw the struggle, not for life, but for power, and parallel with it, and constantly thwarting it, the will to weakness. All religions and moral systems originated in these two forces, and at basis all are either master or slave moralities. By that light he read history, and asserted that whenever the master morality dominated, as in pagan Rome, there was progress and expansion.

Wherever the slave morality—the glorification of weakness, humility, prevailed, as in Christian Rome there was retrogression and degeneracy. He detested altruism and all that the term involves, and exalted egoism. "This new command, oh my brethren, I give unto you: Become hard!" And the ideal he preached was the superman; never very definitely or clearly but with intense poetic fervour.

This somewhat vague conception was to be the very incarnation of the will to power. Strong and beautiful in mind and body, fearless and merciless; loving war and danger; ruling lesser men, who are pawns for him to play with. Nietzsche was nebulous and ambiguous as to the method of producing the superman, but apparently his is an esoteric doctrine intended only for the natural aristocrats who shall by some undefined means succeed in thoroughly enslaving the "herd animal." I fancy that one weapon to be employed is Christianity, which is to be retained for the use of the lower orders, to keep them properly submissive, and to teach them that it is more blessed to give than receive. Certainly he forecasted as the ideal a human society of two evenly balanced classes : A vast inert religious, moral slave class, beneath a small, alert, iconoclastic, immoral, progressive master class.

These, then, appear to be the essential features in Nietzsche's philosophy, "The will to power, master, and slave morality, egoism, and the superman. Extravagant though it may seem at first glance it does not appear incompatible with the theory of survival of the fittest, as proclaimed by Huxley and other followers of Darwin. I may, add, too, that shockingly callous though we may consider him in his bitter tirades against sympathy many biologists will agree with him in the assertion that "Sympathy thwarts the law of development, of evolution, of the survival of the fittest. It is hostile to life!" I firmly believe that this doctrine, confessedly immoral, and deriding morality, will continue to grow and spread.

I base that opinion on the fact that our moral concepts of to-day are those which for two millenniums past have been proclaimed as peculiarly Christian, having no sanction and needing none save the teachings of Christ. And all the signs indicate a breakup of Christianity—it is already practically extinct amongst the cultured classes, though they may make a formal profession of it. So there seems a strong probability that as Christianity decays so will the ethics taught with it.

Thus far I have tried to state Nietzscheism impartially and dispassionately, but I now testify that I believe it to be in its very essence a pernicious doctrine, subversive of progress, and opposed to the latest conclusions of evolutionary science.

14 July 1916

II.

The bitterest opponents of Nietzsche must concede him a vast accumulation of knowledge ; a splendid capacity for daring, original thought, and an almost unique power of vivid expression.

In his many books he roamed over the whole world of thought, and, let us admit, made many interesting and valuable philosophical discoveries. In these latter days, too, when the State is steadily expanding its functions and exerting an increasing despotism over the individual; when majority rule is exalted into a fetish ; when "banded unions persecute opinions and induce a line when single thought is a civil crime, and individual freedom mute," the fierce individualism of Nietzsche has a wonderful attraction to many independent minds. He hated mob rule, State tyranny, and the levelling tendency so apparent to-day, and many of us are in complete sympathy with those sentiments. Certainly, too, his crusade against Christianity has gained him many followers, who think, with him, it is an anachronism and the virtue has gone out of it.

Nevertheless, I feel that the very fact that so many of us will find so many points of agreement with him renders him the more dangerous. The process of time has already proved him great enough to gain a devoted following amongst superior minds, therefore his philosophy demands and deserves the most critical analysis. There never was such a marked period, of transition as now, when all old things are passing away, and beliefs hoary with age are being flung in to the crucible. At this momentous epoch, then, when dogmas are dying, and institutions crumbling, we should be specially careful, lest we destroy the wheat with the tares. It maybe that when we follow daring leaders in attacking the extraneous and the false, we may be misled into destroying the essential and the true.

"Hold fast to Truth, preserve it well
For fear divine Philosophy

May push beyond her mark
and be Procuress to the lords of hell."

The cardinal principles I have outlined as constituting the distinctive features of Nietzsche's message all have their root in a quite new and revolutionary ethical conception, and it is on the ethics of Nietzsche I would concentrate, for on them he stands or falls. Ethics I will define as the science which treats of the distinction between right and wrong, and of the moral sense by which they are discriminated. Nietzsche continually demands a transvaluation of moral values and a transformation of social relations. In fact, he repudiates any permanent basis of moral values at all, any conduct is moral which tends to promote his ideal superman.

And since the goal he strives for is a society bisected by caste—a few lordly rulers and a humble horde of the ruled, he derides the conception of a human brotherhood with equal rights for all. "A people is the roundabout way by which Nature arrives at six or seven great men." And this ascendant type is to be evolved by the practice of hardness, egoism, ruthlessness and an utter disregard for the "herd animal." (He ardently admired Napoleon, by the way.) The mass of the people, in a word, are merely the stepping stones over which their natural rulers shall climb to their proper high places.

He claims for this doctrine the sanction of biology and history, and if that claim be substantiated then Nietzsche's philosophy is indubitably sound. Fortunately this brings the question squarely to the decision of physical facts and clear of the mists of metaphysics.

Let it be understood here that Nietzsche had no biological training, and he denied the necessity of such training to dogmatise on biology—he always insisted that intuition was the final authority. Nor can he be considered a thoroughly equipped historian,"for though he had studied history deeply, it was mainly from the narrow philological standpoint. (He was a professor of philology). Regarding the intuitive basis for his biological argument, I think modern psychology has amply demonstrated the utter unreliability of the intuition as a philosophical factor. Nevertheless it is a singular fact that Nietzsche, the bookish recluse, made an astounding discovery in biology which had been overlooked by great specialists like Darwin and Huxley, and on this discovery he built. The following quotation from his own works is a concentrated statement of that pregnant truth: "As to the famous struggle for existence, it seems to me, for the present, to be more of an assumption than a fact. It does occur, but as an exception. The general condition of life is not one of want or famine, but rather of riches, of lavish luxuriance—where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power. We should not confound Malthus with Nature."

Since he penned those lines later research has, I believe, conclusively disproved the Darwinian theory that the struggle for existence is the prime factor in evolution, though, as I will endeavour to show later, the struggle for power is by no means the true or only alternative. To concede this would be to concede the whole position, for if what Nietzsche calls the will to power were the force which differentiated and improved the species it would naturally follow that, since it achieved the making of man, it should hereafter lead us to the Superman. With reference to his deductions from history, though he was not a really great historian, yet it may well be that history as related up to his time fully sanctioned the conclusions he drew from it. The history of the school books might justify a pessimist philosopher in deciding warfare and oppression were the very springs of conduct, and that social chaos can only be averted through the usurpation of power by stern rulers.

But of late a bright and pleasant light has been shed on history by patient research into the daily life, the customs and institutions of bygone peoples. History, as now becoming understood, is something grander than the tramp of armed hosts, the intrigues and squabbles of tyrants, and I will try to show presently that it does not sanction the conclusions at which Nietzsche arrived.

But besides the inadequacy of his scientific equipment to fit him as a leader of mankind to heights that are higher by strange and devious paths, he had certain fatal temperamental limitations. A perusal of the biography of Nietzsche, while entrancing our sympathy with the man diminishes our respect for the philosopher.

From childhood until the time, some years before his death, when the darkness of insanity closed down upon him, he led a lonely, loveless life. I know of no other man so completely cut off from social relations with his fellows. Throughout his whole journey through life he made singularly few friends, and even these few friendships generally terminated in bitter quarrels. While yet a young man he resigned his professorship of philology, and spent the rest of his life in lonely nomadic wanderings through Europe, mostly in Switzerland and Italy, feverishly working at his books. He never knew the love of a woman—no child was born to him. The first edition of one of his later books he intended for private circulation amongst his friends, and had only forty copies printed in that issue. It is pathetic to note that he only distributed seven. In short it may be said that man, the social animal, the gregarious biped, he knew not at all.

In a large measure this may explain his intuitive belief in a projected state of aristocratic anarchy. It may be of interest to add that he hypnotised himself into a quite unfounded but very firm belief that be himself was of noble descent. This provides a somewhat humorous idea of the reliability of his intuitions and his veneration for caste distinctions.
I shall now conclude this article, and in my next, and last, I shall endeavour not only to show from the evidence of biological and historical facts that Nietzsche's ethics and the philosophy he based upon them were quite unsound. I shall further attempt to demonstrate that the morality which Nietzsche (and all churchmen) claim to be peculiarly Christian and dependent on supernatural decree, are infinitely older than any known religion, older even than man himself, and are scientifically unassailable.
21 July 1916

III.

The purpose of this article is to show that Kropotkin's conception of man's true relationship with his fellows was the direct antithesis of that of Nietzsche and that whereas Nietzsche's conception was an intuitive one Kropotkin's was the product of many years of practical study and research That Kropotkin's arrived at his conclusion from a consideration of a multitude of incontestable facts is therefore inconvertible.

To my mind a piquancy and a greater value is added to Kropotkin's diametrical divergence from Nietzsche on root ethics to note the great similarity of their ideas on relatively secondary questions. Both were militant rationalists in matters religious; both regarded Christianity as a decadent influence.

Both regarded the lessons of our past evolution as the guide to our future progress; and both based their major conclusion on the same point of disagreement with Darwinism, as then understood. I have already quoted Nietzsche's words on the struggle for existence as the central fact and dynamic force of evolution, which he flatly denied.

Let me now quote the opening remarks of Kropotkin in his introduction to "Mutual Aid"—

"Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most Species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies, and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation.

"And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance. I failed to find—although I was eagerly looking for it—that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to tho same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution."

He proceeds to describe the terrible snow storms, the glazed frosts, and the torrential floods which characterise those inclement regions, causing enormous destruction to animal, insect, and bird life. From these facts he early realised the transcendant importance of "natural checks to over-population," compared with the struggle for subsistence between individual members of the same species. "Paucity of life, under-population—not over-population—being the distinctive feature of that immense part of the globe which we name Northern Asia, I conceived since then serious doubts—which subsequent study has only confirmed—as to the reality of that fearful struggle for food and life within each species, which was an article of faith with most Darwinists, and, consequently, as to the dominant part which this sort of competition was supposed to play in the evolution of new species." He saw, too, that where, through the harshness of Nature, there was a struggle for food amongst wild ruminants—semi-wild cattle and horses, and other species—that portion of the species which survived the ordeal were so debilitated in vigour and health that "no progressive evolution of the species can be based upon such periods of keen competition." But where as on the lakes he saw, he saw scores of species and myriads of individuals congregate to rear their progeny; in the colonies of rodents; in great migrations of birds; in fact, through all animated nature "I saw mutual aid and mutual support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution."

Later, when he began to study the relations of Darwinism and Sociology he found it everywhere accepted that the struggle between man and man, animal and animal, was a law of Nature. "This view, however, I could not accept, because I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only has not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation." He was thus induced to devote many years to a deep study of the animal kingdom, of prehistoric and savage man, and of the history of human aggregates, and to accumulate the vast evidence he lays before us in his book which has earned him the lasting gratitude of mankind.

"He fully endorses the opinion of Nietzsche that the struggle for existence is exceptional—not general, and offers no adequate explanation of the story of evolution. But where he and Nietzsche part company, is when, after repudiating the struggle for existence theory, they advance their respective alternatives. I have already outlined Nietzsche's Will to Power, somewhat vaguely I fear, but perhaps not more vaguely than he himself expounded it. But it will be admitted even by followers of Nietzsche he assumed as the dominant fact in evolutionary progress the direct antithesis of the principle of mutual aid.

By that term Kropotkin intends something distinct from Altruism, Sympathy or Love. He says : "It is not love to my neighbour—whom I often do not know at all— which induces me to seize a pail of water and rush towards his house when I see it on fire ; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me."

This instinctive consciousness of the homogeneity of the race, the oneness of the species, which is the dominant factor in life and progress. It is the unconscious recognition that the individual happiness depends on the general happiness, and of the equal rights of all others. Upon this deep-seated formation the higher social qualities are developed, and the true racial progress which is their product.

It is impossible here to follow Kropotkin in his fascinating study of mutual aid in the subhuman species, amongst our savage ancestors, and savage contemporaries.

Like a silver thread steadily strengthening and widening its circumference it first unites man into tribes, then, village communities, mediaeval free cities, and lastly, into national aggregations, with still grander potentialities of future expansion. "Till man to man the world o'er shall brothers be, and a' that."

And the lion, or master morality, which Nietzsche trumpets forth as Nature's fiat, to disobey which is to decay, is the very egoistic principle which from the very beginnings of life, even to the diabolical carnage of this world-war, has destroyed innumerable species and made this earth the tomb of dead empires.

Certainly it is abundantly proved by Kropotkin's research that amongst birds, animals and insects, those species which have the highest development of the sociable qualities, and the lowest of egoism have invariably surpassed all others. It was because man was "par excellence" the gregarious animal with infinitely greater social instincts than any other species that he became the lord and ruler of them all, with dominion o'er land and sea.

For confirmation of these bold statements I must refer readers to the storehouse of knowledge gathered for us by Kropotkin. When they have assimilated that they will agree with me that Nietzsche's moral concepts are the quintessence of degeneracy, and he himself, though unconsciously was the greatest enemy of man.

That some day man will become superman every evolutionist may devoutly hope and believe, but it will not be by the agency of tyranny and slavery, but by the progressive eradication of injustice and oppression, and the consummation of social equity.

"Many a million ages have gone to the making of man. He now is the first, but is he the last? Is he not too base?

Western Mail 28 July 1916,