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H. L. Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:

Nietzsche the Prophet

Nietzsche's Origins

AN individual is never an isolated phenomenon and it is impossible to conceive any idea as existing without some cause. As Haeckel tells us, "the cell never acts; it always reacts." Therefore, it is no denial of Nietzsche to say that his philosophy could not have taken form if certain other men had not labored before him. The same thing might be said, with equal truth, of every philosophy and idea the world has ever known. As Pfleiderer has shown us, even Jesus Christ was the inevitable product of his time, just as Shakespeare, Bonaparte and Voltaire were of theirs. Without Moses there could have been no dispute in the temple and no entry into Jerusalem and no tragic journey up Calvary. Without Bacon, Comte, Schopenhauer and Darwin there could have been no Nietzsche.

It would be interesting, perhaps, to trace back to their primal sources in nascent consciousness the notions which have culminated in the monistic materialism of today, but that would require a review of the entire history of the human struggle for truth: an enterprise whose very immensity is appalling. In place of this, we must content ourselves with a rapid glance at the development of ideas since the Renaissance. The ancients evolved systems of philosophy that attained speculative heights scarcely surpassed today, but it was not until the dawn of organized disbelief in Europe that human intelligence began to arm itself with weapons capable of effectually reaching the vitals of that colossal and terrible monster, super-naturalism.

In the middle ages all experimental inquiry into natural phenomena was regarded as both futile and blasphemous - futile because God could never reveal his secrets without ceasing to be God, and blasphemous because any effort to unveil them was thus necessarily a blow at divinity. ((1)) The learned men of those days contented themselves, in consequence, with interminable arguments about fanciful problems which, on their very face, were insoluble. For four hundred years, for instance, the monks of Germany debated the question whether an angel, in passing from one spot to another, had to traverse the intervening space. Any man who presumed to look into the cause of actual things was pronounced anathema. An anatomist who essayed to learn something about the human stomach by dissecting a cadaver instead of by searching for cabalistic knowledge in the scriptures, was commonly burned at the stake. A man who pointed out that the popes, despite their divine afflatus, frequently indulged in quite human offenses against decency, was regarded as a lunatic or a devil, and in either case some effort was made to kill him. The whole thought of the human race was concentrated upon the hereafter and it was considered an insult to the deity to harbor any desire to improve the conditions of existence on earth. ((2))

But in the course of time, humanity's strong inborn curiosity - the most familiar manifestation of its basic instinct to preserve life by constant adaptation to its environment - became overpowering, and brave men with the lust for knowledge raging within them defied the church and its inquisitors. Most of them were put to death, but a few managed to survive, and these taught disciples. In the end, the number of such men became so large that they were able to disregard the church openly, and the Renaissance was in full flower. The result was a wide-spread and organized inquiry into everything that promised increased knowledge. Men began to seek for facts, not in the scriptures, but in actual things. Instead of trying to puzzle out what the ancient Jewish sages thought about the heart and brain, anatomists turned to the human body and tried to learn for themselves. Instead of consulting the old law books for rules of conduct, men began to consider the actual needs and desires of their contemporaries. In Machiavelli's phrase they began to "follow the real truth of things, rather than an imaginary view of them."

This period of diligent but groping inquiry kept on for a couple of centuries and before the beginning of the French revolution a vast mass of facts had been accumulated. Bacon, Nicolas of Cusa and Machiavelli had put common-sense into ethics; the physicians had begun to know not a little about the human machine; through the efforts of Althusius, Mariana and others the old superstitions about the divine rights of kings and princes were dying out; Adam Smith was preparing to unearth the forces which made for national welfare, and a host of impious doubters were examining the current schemes of religion and showing their absurdity. The French revolution then made its blinding flash and after that the air was clear. Since the latter part of the 18th century, indeed, our whole outlook upon the universe has been changed. We have learned to judge things, not by their respectability and holiness, but by their essential truth. It is now possible, not only to approach facts with an unbiased mind, but also to make critical examinations of ideas: i.e., to consider the human mind itself as a living organism and to examine, not only its functions, but also its growth.

Comte, a Frenchman, was the first to perform this last feat with any success. He looked back over the history of the human race and found that it had progressed through three intellectual stages.((3)) During the first stage, men ascribed every act in the universe to the direct interposition of the deity. During the second, they tried to analyze this deity's motives, and so endeavored to learn why things happened: why the sun rose every morning, why one man was white and another black, one tall and another short; why everyone had to die. During the last stage, they began to realize that this inquiry was futile and that the answer would be out of their reach for all eternity. Then they turned from asking why and began to ask how. In a word, they began to accept the universe as it was and to content themselves with learning all they could about its workings and about the invariable laws which controlled these workings.

Comte called this last attitude positivism and showed that the world of his day had reached it. Out of it grew the notion that, inasmuch as man could never hope to learn anything, certainly and beyond question, about the hereafter, it behooved him to devote all of his energies to improving the conditions of life on earth. This subsidiary notion was given the name of utilitarianism and it is the impelling force in everything that we look upon as progress at present. The object of every science and industry and of every civilized scheme of government is to make life easier and humanity happier. The anarchists and the socialists are both seeking the same end, though their plans for attaining it are diametrically opposed. The biologists whose life-work is the destruction of malignant organisms, the politicians whose idea is a rich and prosperous state, the theologians whose goal is perfect peace of mind, the merchants whose life-work is the economical exchange of products, and the philosophers who are trying to determine accurately the laws which govern the universe - all are trying, as best they may, to make mankind safer and happier.

It is plain, of course, that before we may make any conscious effort to increase happiness, we must first know what happiness is. That is, we must first be sure that a certain thing will make men happier before we set about obtaining it. It is the business of metaphysicians to settle this problem. Unluckily they seldom agree about it, and so the efforts of those men, who, in a practical manner, desire to aid us is complicated by the fact that our wise men cannot come to an unanimous decision as to what we want.

This is no place to rehearse all of the ideals of happiness advanced, at different times, by the philosophers of different schools. We have time only to recall what has been set forth, in previous chapters, about the ideal evolved by Arthur Schopenhauer. His theory, as we have seen, was that the will to live was at the bottom of all human actions and that it worked by giving rise to what we call wants or desires. His final conclusion was that these wants would ever remained unsatisfied, and that, in consequence, it was best to avoid unhappiness by killing them and also the will to live at back of them. Nietzsche accepted the first part of Schopenhauer's theory, but rejected the last part. That is to say, he agreed that the will to live was the mainspring of all human action, but he denied that it was wise to seek happiness by killing it. The thing to do, he said, was to give it free rein, and to remove as far as possible, the obstacles which stood in the way of its exercise and satisfaction.

Thus Nietzsche got the groundwork of his philosophy from Schopenhauer. In much the same way, he borrowed from Comte. The latter, as we have seen, argued that the chief concern of humanity was to make life as bearable as possible here on earth, and this idea Nietzsche adopted. But Comte, going further, maintained that earthly happiness depended upon mutual help and mutual dependence, and here Nietzsche disagreed with him squarely. Thus the philosopher of the superman was a disciple of Schopenhauer and Comte and at the same time their opponent. Without their data his philosophy would have been impossible, but with their conclusions it had nothing in common. In a word, they served him merely as the farmer serves the miller: by providing grain for his mill.

Again, Nietzsche got the law of natural selection from Darwin, and with characteristic daring, gave it a universality from which Darwin shrank. ((4)) In his later years he was fond of berating the English biologist, but the fact that he was a Darwinian cannot be disputed. The superman, indeed, is the crowning stone of the pyramid rising from the ultimate protoplasm, and truncated today at man. Again, from Hume, Swift, Butler, Voltaire, Montaigne, Sanchez, Kepler, Descartes and all the daring company of seekers after truth whose ranks included Lamarck, Tyndall, Humboldt, Franklin, Watt and Goethe - from these materialists he got his fine frenzy for getting at the bottom of concrete problems, without regard for the opinions, superstitions or prejudices of others. Nietzsche despised the metaphysicians, properly so-called, and heaped upon them the vials of his wrath. For Kant, whose investigation into the limitations of intelligence led him into altruistic ethical doctrines, he had boundless and unutterable contempt, and for Liebnitz and Hegel, who argued that the universe was ruled by intelligence, he had loathing. Yet he got something from all three of these men - particularly from Kant - and that something was a chronic doubt of all that passed for truth among people in general. Nietzsche came, in the end, indeed, to question at once, and as a matter of course, everything that seemed true to the average, unthinking, conventional, conservative man. "What everybody believes," he said, "is never true."

Of his immediate predecessors in the domain of philosophy, Nietzsche probably owed much to Max Stirner and not a little to Karl Marx. It may seem incongruous to seek a common idea in the prophet of the superman and the high priest of human brotherhood; yet it is nevertheless a fact that Marx's materialistic conception of history made its mark upon Nietzsche. As an American commentator(5) tells us, this conception is nothing more than the notion "that the bread and butter question is the most important question in life." That is to say, a man's whole existence is colored by the conditions which he must meet and overcome in order to survive. His method of making a living, in the broad sense, is the determining factor in the evolution of his morality and his religion. We find Nietzsche accepting this theory as something almost self-evident. It is ever his postulate in his argument that the superman's absolute fitness to meet the conditions of existence upon earth will make him careless of moral codes and independent of gods.

From Stirner he got many things, and not the least of them was the example of uncompromising and defiant courage. Stirner was the most fiery and radical of all the vast army of sham-smashers and idol-killers who fought orthodoxy during the first half of the nineteenth century. He held that the world would not be fit to live in until it had accepted complete and absolute individualism. Religion custom, morality, tradition, popular opinion - all of these things he held to be obstacles in the path of progress. Every sane man, he argued, should be permitted to do whatever he pleased, no matter what others thought of it. But though Nietzsche accepted this argument, his application of it differed vastly from Stirner's. The latter made it a justification for the most revolting sort of self-indulgence and sensuality. Nietzsche, for all his contempt for religion and law, knew very well that swinish license, instead of making the race stronger, would quickly bring it up to the dead wall of disease, weakness and sterility.

It was this very familiarity with natural laws that separated Nietzsche from all the wild mob of anarchists who raged and roared through Europe in the 1840s and 50s. He was an advocate of utter freedom, but he saw very clearly that freedom and license, instinct and emotion, were not the same. He knew, indeed, that the laws of nature stood unalterably opposed to dissoluteness. Therefore, his ideal, the superman, for all his freedom and egoism, was by no means a helpless slave to wild passions.

On the contrary, he argued that the superman would be a creature in whom all those manifestations that we call human passions, by being satisfied as quickly as they arose, would cease to trouble. In the matter of the sexual instinct, for instance, the superman would be the antithesis of a celibate, but he would be equally far from a roué. His desire, like that of a savage or an animal, would be exactly strong enough to insure the perpetuation of his race - and no stronger. [You can see the weary hand of Schopenhauer in this - DMR.]

Several commentators have tried to show that Nietzsche borrowed many of his ideas from Paul Rée, some saying that he stole bodily and others that he evolved his own notions by the simple process of denying those of Rée. He himself says, in the foreword to The Genealogy of Morals that Rée's book, "The Origin of Moral Sensations," excited his violent antagonism and disgust. "Never," he says, "have I read a book to which, proposition by proposition and conclusion to conclusion, I said such an emphatic No." But it is evident that, in order to object so vigorously to an argument, a man must have already formed contrary opinions, and such, in fact, was the case with Nietzsche. His own philosophy began to take form in his mind just as soon as his mind began to function. "As a boy of 13," he says, "the problem of the origin of evil haunted me, and to it I dedicated my first literary child-play." Throughout his youth his views were being formulated, and by 1868 - when he was 22 - they had already crystallized into the idea that instinct was the only reliable guide of intelligence. It was not until 1877 that Rée's book was printed. That Rée was his friend, at least for a few years, is admitted, and that this friendship increased Nietzsche's acquaintance with the work of other investigators - particularly with that of the English materialists - and greatly amplified his store of positive knowledge, is certain, but the mad philosopher had already thought for himself and the main current of his ideas was by no means diverted from its former path. Between his work and Rée's there is no more in common than one may find in the work of any two men who seek solutions of similar problems and write in the same language and in the same age.

It is a favorite pastime of the opponents of Nietzsche to attack his claim to fame by showing that many of his ideas were voiced years ago by other men. They point out, for example, that his individualism was not unknown to the ancient Greeks, that his ethical ideas, in general, are those of Callicles, as set forth by Plato in the "Gorgias" [this is what Will Durant said in the 1920s]; that his materialism comes from Lucretius and Democritus, that his chronic skepticism recalls Xenophanes, Parmenides, Arcesilaus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Pyrrho and the Eleatic Zeno; that his pessimism, going beyond Schopenhauer, has its source in Hegesippus; that his distinction between master-morality and slave-morality was known to the Sophists and Epicureans and laid down by Francis Bacon,((6)) that his notions about Apollo and Dionysus and his deification of energy were prompted by William Blake,((7)) that his discovery that all morality is irksome to men of genuine force was made before him, by Machiavelli,((8)) that the Pythagoreans speculated about the doctrine of eternal recurrence thousands of years before he was born, and that his idea of sublime indifference formed the cardinal doctrine of stoicism and was voiced, besides, by certain of his contemporaries.((9))

It may be submitted, in answer to all of this, that the same thing might be alleged against any philosopher. As we have seen, a human being is never an isolated phenomenon. His mental processes come down to him from his ancestors just as much as the shape of his nose or the number of his toes. What we understand by a philosopher is merely a man who views the ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, points out their truth or falsity, shows how they are related, one to the other, and evolves from the mass some definite scheme of life and thought. This task Nietzsche accomplished. His scheme of things may be wrong, but the very fact that it has strongly impressed the thinking men of today, shows that it is reasonable and thinkable and workable, and that, in its essentials, it is just as much in harmony with the known facts of existence as any other effort to transmute the particular into the general - as the atomic theory, for instance, or Ehrlich's hypothesis of immunity.

Toward the end of his life Nietzsche undertook to analyze his own ideas and to show their sources in the ideas of other men,((10)) but it must be confessed that his revelations scarcely revealed. He explained, in an indefinite sort of a way, why he despised Rousseau, Seneca, Plato, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, George Sand, Carlyle, Mill, Renan, Saint-Beuve, à Kempis and Spinoza, and he voiced his admiration for Goethe, Thucydides, Sallust and Horace, and his queer half-admiration, half-contempt for Schopenhauer, Comte, Darwin and others, but his discourse was confined, in the main, to phrase-making. Reading his chapters calmly it is evident that he failed utterly to perceive his debt to many men whose work supplied him with valuable data, if not with ready-made conclusions. As he grew older, indeed, Nietzsche fell into the habit of damning utterly all who happened to disagree with his contempt for schemes of morality, of whatever sort, despite the fact that many of these men agreed with him perfectly in other things.

Nietzsche wrote with sulphuric acid upon tables of phosphorus and at times his criticisms descended to mere invective. He called Dante, "an hyena poetizing in a graveyard;" George Sand, "a milch cow with a grand manner;" Carlyle, "a pessimist whose thoughts arise from a bad stomach;" the Goncourts, "a pair of Ajaxes fighting Homer, with music by Offenbach;" Zola, "the delight to stink;" Seneca, "the toreador of virtue;" Saint-Beuve, "an anti-man with a woman's vengefulness and a woman's sensuousness;" Schopenhauer, "a king counterfeiter;" and Plato, "a coward in the presence of reality" and a "tiresome" master of "superior cheatery." There is wit upon some of these tags and a few have wisdom, too, but it is obvious that such studied striving after mere verbal brilliance, while it may produce prettiness, scarcely serves the cause of the critical art. Nietzsche learned a great deal from the masters of epigram he so much admired and they gave him his extraordinarily vivid and striking style, but he also got from them a tendency to seek the irreducible minimum just a bit too assiduously. He made phrases that sparkled like jewels, but now and again, in reading them, one longs for the slow, painstaking march of a Spencer or the illuminating prodigality of a Zola.

In his more contemplative moments Nietzsche saw very clearly that his own work was merely the natural development of the work of other men. In Morgenröte (V, § 547), and elsewhere he argued that the greatest obstacle in the path of increasing knowledge was the old notion that there was some one all-embracing secret of existence, which, on being uncovered, would answer all of humanity's questions and make all things plain. Progress, he said, was not a matter of untying a Gordian knot or of discovering a philosopher's stone: it could be thought of only as a slow, but constant accumulation of facts. It was impossible, he pointed out, for a single man, in the brief span of life allotted to human beings, to explore the whole field of knowledge. Therefore, it was necessary for every man to begin by acquiring the knowledge resulting from the explorations of those before him. Nietzsche denounced Schopenhauer and other philosophers for their insistence upon the fallacy that their schemes of thought made all things clear, and then ended by making practically the same claim for his own. The student of the mad German will find this inconsistency throughout his work. So long as he dealt with ideas his mental processes were the movements of a machine, but when he considered human beings in the concrete - and particularly when he discussed himself - his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined to make his conclusions unreliable, and even nonsensical.

1. Isaiah, XL, 28: "There is no searching of his understanding." Rom. XI, 33: "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out." Ps. XXXIX, 9: "I was dumb, I opened not my mouth, because thou didst it." See also a multitude of other passages in the Old Testament.
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2. This idea persisted among the pious into our own time, and is the thesis of that most abominable encyclopedia of superstition, Baxter's "Saint's Rest," See American Tract Society's shorter version (1824), p. 251: "I am persuaded that our discontents and murmurings are not so provoking to God...as our too sweet enjoying, and resting in, a pleased state." In other words, a happy man is doomed to hell. Rev. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) wrote many books, but "The Saint's Everlasting Rest" was his most important. Down to 1860 it was to be found in every Christian household and according to one statistician, more than 2,000,000 copies were sold.
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3. Auguste Comte: Cours de philosophie positive, Eng. tr. by Helen Martineau; London, 1853.
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4. Vide the chapter on "Christianity."
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5. R. R. La Monte, Socialism: Positive and Negative; Chicago, 1907.
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6. Consider, for instance, this from Bacon's Essays (1597): "Mean men must adhere, but great men, that have strength in themselves, were better to maintain themselves indifferent and neutral." See The Essays of Francis Bacon, with an int. by Henry Morley; London, 1887.
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7. William Blake (1757-1827), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; reprint, Boston, 1906. Blake was a mystic poet who embraced spiritualism and died crazy. He was also an engraver and is best known today for his weird drawings à la Beardsley.
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8. Niccalo di Bernardo del Machiavelli (1469-1527), De Principatibus, Rome, 1532. Tr. and pub. in many editions as The Prince.
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9. Blanqui: L'Eternité par les Astres, Paris, 1871; Gustave Le Bon: L'Homme et les Sociétés; Paris, 1882
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10. Götzendämmerung, 1889.
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