Classic Philosophy for the Modern Man Page 12
It may be urged that there is a remedy for all this in the appeal from the ignorant many to the enlightened few. But the few who are judges of what is called real and solid merit are not forward to communicate their occult discoveries to others; they are withheld partly by envy, and partly by pusillanimity. The strongest minds are by rights the most independent and ingenious; but then they are competitors in the lists, and jealous of the prize. The prudent (and the wise are prudent!) only add their hearty applause to the acclamations of the multitude, which they can neither silence nor dispute. So Mr. Gifford dedicated those verses to Mr. Hoppner, when securely seated on the heights of fame and fortune, which before he thought might have savoured too much of flattery or friendship. Those even who have the sagacity to discover it seldom volunteer to introduce obscure merit into publicity, so as to endanger their own pretensions: they praise the world’s idols, and bow down at the altars which they cannot overturn by violence or undermine by stealth! Suppose literary men to be the judges and vouchers for literary merit – but it may sometimes happen that a literary man (however high in genius or in fame) has no passion but the love of distinction, and hates every person or thing that interferes with his inadmissible and exorbitant claims. Dead to every other interest, he is alive to that, and starts up, like a serpent when trod upon, out of the slumber of wounded pride. The cold slime of indifference is turned into rank poison at the sight of your approach to an equality or competition with himself. If he is an old acquaintance, he would keep you always where you were, under his feet to be trampled on; if a new one, he wonders he never heard of you before. As you become known, he expresses a greater contempt for you, and grows more captious and uneasy. The more you strive to merit his good word, the farther you are from it. Such characters will not only sneer at your well-meant endeavours, and keep silent as to your good qualities, but are out of countenance, ‘quite chop-fallen’, if they find you have a cup of water, or a crust of bread. It is only when you are in a jail, starved or dead, that their exclusive pretensions are safe, or their Argus-eyed suspicions laid asleep. This is a true copy, nor is it taken from one sitting, or a single subject. An author nowadays to succeed must be something more than an author – a nobleman, or rich plebeian; the simple literary character is not enough. ‘Such a poor forked animal’, as a mere poet or philosopher turned loose upon public opinion, has no chance against the flocks of bats and owls that instantly assail him. It is name, it is wealth, it is title and influence that mollifies the tender-hearted Cerberus[20] of criticism – first, by placing the honorary candidate for fame out of the reach of Grub-street malice; secondly, by holding out the prospect of a dinner or a vacant office to successful sycophancy. This is the reason why a certain magazine praises Percy Bysshe Shelley, and vilifies ‘Johnny Keats’:[21] they know very well that they cannot ruin the one in fortune as well as in fame, but they may ruin the other in both, deprive him of a livelihood together with his good name, send him to Coventry,[22] and into the rules of a prison; and this is a double incitement to the exercise of their laudable and legitimate vocation. We do not hear that they plead the good-natured motive of the editor of the Quarterly Review, that ‘they did it for his good’, because someone, in consequence of that critic’s abuse, had sent the author a present of five-and-twenty pounds! One of these writers went so far, in a sort of general profession of literary servility, as to declare broadly that there had been no great English poet, and that no one had a right to pretend to the character of a man of genius in this country who was not of patrician birth – or connections by marriage! This hook was well baited.
These are the doctrines that enrich the shops,
That pass with reputation through the land,
And bring their authors an immortal name.
It is the sympathy of the public with the spite, jealousy, and irritable humours of the writers, that nourishes this disease in the public mind; this, this ‘embalms and spices to the April day again’, what otherwise ‘the spital[23] and the lazar-house[24] would heave the gorge at!’
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William Godwin. ↵
John Horne Tooke. ↵
An equivocal word or phrase; specifically: a pun. ↵
William Pitt. ↵
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ↵
A Mercury is not made out of any block of wood. ↵
‘Consider the end’: live so that your life will be approved after your death; also: consider the consequences of your action. ↵
Sir Walter Scott. ↵
A superior mind. ↵
A name given to a rooster, especially in fairy tales. ↵
Voice stuck in throat. ↵
The servant. ↵
The Irish journalist Edward Sterling. ↵
It's as nasty a job as speaking ill of someone. ↵
I regard nothing human as foreign to me. ↵
Edmund Kean. ↵
When Pope declared his love for her she responded with laughter. ↵
From Walter Scott's novel, The Black Dwarf. ↵
Hazlitt: ‘It is more desirable to be the handsomest than the wisest man in Majesty’s dominions, for there are more people who have eyes than understandings. Sir John Suckling tell us that ‘He prized black eyes and a lucky hit/At bowls, above all the trophies of wit.' In like manner, I would be permitted to say, that I am somewhat sick of this trade of authorship, where the critics look askance at one’s best-meant efforts, but am still fond of those athletic exercises, where they do not keep two scores to mark the game, with Whig and Tory notches. The accomplishments of the body are obvious and clear to all: those of the mind are recondite and doubtful, and therefore grudgingly acknowledged, or held up as the sport of prejudice, spite, and folly.’ ↵
A three-headed dog that in Greek mythology guards the entrance to Hades. ↵
Hazlitt: ‘Written in June 1820.’ ↵
‘To send to Coventry': to ostracize. ↵
Hospital. ↵
Leper colony. ↵
9
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Introduction
Nietzsche was one of the first great radical traditionalists. He believed that recent human history had been little more than an evolution towards mediocrity. And he thought he could point to a way out.
One of Nietzsche’s major projects was to construct what he called a ‘genealogy of morals’ – an account of the origin and history of moral values. Moral values are not, he said, objective and universal. Instead, they are relative and local. Broadly speaking, morality can be divided into two opposing types – master morality and slave morality.
Master morality is morality as determined by the ruling caste. When rulers determine what is meant by ‘good’, they refer to ‘the exalted, proud disposition’ that characterises their own caste. When they determine what is meant by ‘bad’, they refer to all that they hold in contempt and disregard: the cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and the self-abasing. Under this moral view, the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means, in practice, the same as ‘noble’ and ‘despicable’.
Slave morality starts out from a fundamentally different point of origin – the perspective of the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, and the weary. The moral viewpoint of this group will develop along a very different path. The oppressed will adopt a pessimistic suspicion towards man’s condition and perhaps condemn it outright. In this context, it is the qualities that alleviate the existence of sufferers that will be constituted as the ‘good’: sympathy, the helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness. These are the most useful qualities and the only means of supporting the burden of existence.
A more profound distinction can be found in the source of value judgments. The nobler type of man regards himself as the determiner of values. He does not require to be approved of; instead, he passes the judgment. And he honours what he recognises in himself. The slavish type of man, on the other hand, seeks to elicit good opinion
s of himself from others, rejoicing over every good opinion and suffering from every bad one. This is the oldest instinct of subjection and it survives in the blood as vanity.
To grasp the full reach of this philosophy, you have to understand that insofar as master morality and slave morality exist today, they do so not by way of literal ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ but rather in tendencies and orientations of the human soul. Nietzsche was very specific about this: he thought that the two moralities have often been found confused and juxtaposed within the same man. What is in issue, then, is no longer the morality of the nobility as a caste, but rather the predominance of the nobler tendencies within the individual soul.
It is in this respect that Nietzsche is a source of real insight for the modern man. It is true that what he has to say about the decline of man and the rise of the cult of mediocrity provides a valuable check and counterpoise to the excesses of progressivism. It is also true that what he has to say about the relativity of morals gives proper perspective to value judgments that so often function as a cover story and vehicle for self-interest. But these are secondary benefits.
The primary benefit for the modern man is the self-grounding that Nietzsche’s analysis can provide. There is no ascertainable objective basis for your values, he insists. Everyone is alone in a universe of exploitation and predation. Respond, then, as a man noble in soul would do. That means no more abjection and no more ‘self-dwarfing’. It means looking forward to building your own future rather than upwards for approval. And, above all, it means becoming a determiner of your own values and serving the universe not out of pity, but from a feeling of abundance, strength, and healthy self-love.
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Chapter 9
What is Noble?
257. Every elevation of the type ‘man’ has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be – a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance – that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type ‘man’, the continued ‘self-surmounting of man’, to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type ‘man’): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has originated! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power – they were more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as ‘more complete beasts’).
258. Corruption – as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called ‘life’, is convulsed – is something radically different according to the organization in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, it was corruption: it was really only the closing act of the corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly prerogatives and lowered itself to a function of royalty (in the end even to its decoration and parade-dress). The essential thing, however, in a good and healthy aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the significance and highest justification thereof – that it should therefore accept with a good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing plants in Java – they are called Sipo Matador – which encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, and exhibit their happiness.
259. To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one’s will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organization). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is – namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organization within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal – it takes place in every healthy aristocracy – must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organization, do all that towards other bodies which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy – not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which ‘the exploiting character’ is to be absent – that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. ‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life. Granting that as a theory this is a novelty – as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!
260. In a tour through the many finer and coarser moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring regularly together, and connected with one another, until finally two primary types revealed themselves to me, and a radical distinction was brought to light. There is master-morality and slave-morality – I would at once add, however, that in all higher and mixed civilizations, there are also attempts at the reconciliation of the two moralities, but one finds still oftener the confusion and mutual misunderstanding of them, indeed sometimes their close juxtaposition – even in the same man, within one soul. The distinctions of moral values have either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly conscious of being different from the ruled – or among the ruled class, the slaves and dependents of all sorts. In the first case, when it is the rule
rs who determine the conception ‘good’, it is the exalted, proud disposition which is regarded as the distinguishing feature, and that which determines the order of rank. The noble type of man separates from himself the beings in whom the opposite of this exalted, proud disposition displays itself: he despises them. Let it at once be noted that in this first kind of morality the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘bad’ means practically the same as ‘noble’ and ‘despicable’ – the antithesis ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, the insignificant, and those thinking merely of narrow utility are despised; moreover, also, the distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self-abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let themselves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and above all the liars – it is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people are untruthful. ‘We truthful ones’ – the nobility in ancient Greece called themselves. It is obvious that everywhere the designations of moral value were at first applied to men; and were only derivatively and at a later period applied to actions; it is a gross mistake, therefore, when historians of morals start with questions like, ‘Why have sympathetic actions been praised?’ The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: ‘What is injurious to me is injurious in itself’; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honour on things; he is a creator of values. He honours whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality equals self-glorification. In the foreground there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow: the noble man also helps the unfortunate, but not – or scarcely – out of pity, but rather from an impulse generated by the super-abundance of power. The noble man honours in himself the powerful one, him also who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and how to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. ‘Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast’, says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: ‘He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one’. The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees precisely in sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in desinteressement,[1] the characteristic of the moral; faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity and irony towards ‘selflessness’, belong as definitely to noble morality, as do a careless scorn and precaution in presence of sympathy and the ‘warm heart’. It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. The profound reverence for age and for tradition – all law rests on this double reverence – the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of ‘modern ideas’ believe almost instinctively in ‘progress’ and the ‘future’, and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these ‘ideas’ has complacently betrayed itself thereby. A morality of the ruling class, however, is more especially foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the sternness of its principle that one has duties only to one’s equals; that one may act towards beings of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as seems good to one, or ‘as the heart desires’, and in any case ‘beyond good and evil’: it is here that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a place. The ability and obligation to exercise prolonged gratitude and prolonged revenge – both only within the circle of equals – artfulness in retaliation, raffinement[2] of the idea in friendship, a certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance – in fact, in order to be a good friend): all these are typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, as has been pointed out, is not the morality of ‘modern ideas’, and is therefore at present difficult to realize, and also to unearth and disclose. It is otherwise with the second type of morality, slave-morality. Supposing that the abused, the oppressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, and those uncertain of themselves should moralize, what will be the common element in their moral estimates? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with regard to the entire situation of man will find expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, together with his situation. The slave has an unfavourable eye for the virtues of the powerful; he has a skepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust of everything ‘good’ that is there honoured – he would fain persuade himself that the very happiness there is not genuine. On the other hand, those qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded with light; it is here that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities, and almost the only means of supporting the burden of existence. Slave-morality is essentially the morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous antithesis ‘good’ and ‘evil’: power and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not admit of being despised. According to slave-morality, therefore, the ‘evil’ man arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is precisely the ‘good’ man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being. The contrast attains its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation – it may be slight and well-intentioned – at last attaches itself to the ‘good’ man of this morality; because, according to the servile mode of thought, the good man must in any case be the safe man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un bonhomme. Everywhere that slave-morality gains the ascendancy, language shows a tendency to approximate the significations of the words ‘good’ and ‘stupid’. A last fundamental difference: the desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of thinking and estimating. Hence we can understand without further detail why love as a passion – it is our European specialty – must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the ‘gai saber’,[3] to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.