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Santayana's Criticism Of Nietzsche
Reprinted here are chapters 12 and 13 of George Santayana's
The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968), a work originally titled
Egotism In German Philosophy and published in 1915. Chapter 12 is "The Ethics of Nietzsche," and Chapter 13 is "The Superman."
1.
Brief Introduction2.
The Ethics of Nietzsche3.
The Superman 1. Brief Introduction
The philosophy of George Santayana (1863-1952) resists easy
classification. On the one hand, he considered himself a "convinced
materialist" with a healthy regard for the epistemological credentials
of science. He freely acknowledged that no religion can be literally
true. Though he spent his last years in a convent in Rome, inhabiting a
single room with scant possessions, he refused to profess his faith in
God -- this despite the entreaties of solicitous nuns.
On the
other hand, he described himself as a "moral Platonist" with Catholic
leanings who found the whole real world to be brutal, ugly, and vain. He
preferred the flights of fancy that poetry offered him, and he
approached religion not with hostility but with openness and gratitude.
The life of the spirit was alive in him, and he believed, like Plato,
that spirituality consists in the contemplation of ideal essences.
He reproached the whole German tradition, from Kant, Fichte and Hegel
right up to Nietzsche, for embracing what he called egotism,
"subjectivity in thought and wilfulness in morals."
What are
the fatal weaknesses of this doctrine? According to Santayana, it
"assumes, if it does not assert, that the source of one's being and
power lies in oneself, that will and logic are by right omnipotent, and
that nothing should control the mind or the conscience except the mind
or the conscience itself." Egotism "denies that we are created beings
owing reverence to immense forces beyond ourselves, which endow us with
our limited faculties and powers, govern our fortunes, and shape our
very loves without our permission."
Santayana thought
Nietzsche was a "constitutional invalid," the belated prophet of
romanticism who preferred "the bracing atmosphere of falsehood, passion,
and subjective perspectives" to truth. The chapters below take up these
and similar points, and offer wonderful insights into the inadequacies
of a thinker who nowadays is too seldom criticized.
2. The Ethics of Nietzsche
"Nietzsche occasionally spoke disparagingly of morality, as if the word
and the thing had got a little on his nerves; and some of his
best-known phrases might give the impression that he wished to drop the
distinction between good and evil and transcend ethics altogether. Such a
thought would not have been absurd in itself or even unphilosophical.
Many serious thinkers, Spinoza for instance, have believed that
everything that happens is equally necessary and equally expressive of
the will of God, be it favourable or unfavourable to our special
interests and, therefore, called by us good or bad. A too reverent
immersion in nature and history convinces them that to think any part of
reality better or worse than the rest is impertinent or even impious.
It is true that in the end these philosophers usually stultify
themselves and declare enthusiastically that whatever is is right. This
rapturous feeling can overcome anybody in certain moods, as it sometimes
overcame Nietzsche; but in yielding to it, besides contradicting all
other moral judgments, these mystics break their difficult resolution
never to judge at all.
"Nietzsche, however, was entirely free
from this divine impediment in morals. The courage to cling to what his
soul loved -- and this courage is the essence of morality -- was
conspicuous in him. He was a poet, a critic, a lover of form and of
distinctions. Few persons have ever given such fierce importance to
their personal taste. What he disliked to think of, say democracy, he
condemned with the fulminations of a god; what he liked to think of,
power, he seriously commanded man and nature to pursue for their single
object.
"What Nietzsche disparaged, then, under the name of
morality was not all morality, for he had an enthusiastic
master-morality of his own to impose. He was thinking only of the
Christian virtues and especially of a certain Protestant and Kantian
moralism with which perhaps he had been surfeited. This moralism
conceived that duty was something absolute and not a method of securing
whatever goods of all sorts are attainable by action. The latter is the
common and the sound opinion, maintained, for instance, by Aristotle;
but Nietzsche, who was not humble enough to learn very much by study,
thought he was propounding a revolutionary doctrine when he put goods
and evils beyond and above right and wrong...Nietzsche, then, far from
transcending ethics, re-established it on its true foundations, which is
not to say that the sketchy edifice which he planned to raise on these
foundations was in a beautiful style of architecture or could stand at
all.
"The first principle of his ethics was that the good is
power. But this word power seems to have had a great range of meanings
in his mind. Sometimes it suggests animal strength and size, as in the
big blonde beast; sometimes vitality, sometimes fortitude, sometimes
contempt for the will of others, sometimes (and this is perhaps the
meaning he chiefly intended) dominion over natural forces and over the
people, that is to say, wealth and military power. It is characteristic
of this whole school that it confuses the laws which are supposed to
preside over the movement of things with the good results which they may
involve; so Nietzsche confuses his biological insight, that all life is
the assertion of some sort of power -- the power to breathe, for
instance -- with the admiration he felt for a masterful egotism. But
even if we identify life or any kind of existence with the exertion of
strength, the kinds of strength exerted will be heterogeneous and not
always compatible. The strength of Lucifer does not insure victory in
war; it points rather to failure in a world peopled by millions of
timid, pious, and democratic persons. Hence we find Nietzsche asking
himself plaintively, 'Why are the feeble victorious?' The fact rankled
in his bosom that in the ancient world martial aristocracies had
succumbed before Christianity, and in the modern world before democracy.
By strength, then, he could not mean the power to survive, by being as
flexible as circumstances may require. He did not refer to the strength
of majorities, nor to the strength of vermin. At the same time he did
not refer to moral strength, for of moral strength he had no idea.
"The arts give power, but only in channels prescribed by their own
principles, not by the will of untrained men. To be trained is to be
tamed and harnessed, an accession of power detestable to Nietzsche. His
Zarathustra had the power of dancing, also of charming serpents and
eagles: no wonder that he missed the power, bestowed by goodness, of
charming and guiding men; and a Terpsichorean autocrat would be hard to
imagine. A man intent on algebra or on painting is not striving to rule
anybody; his dominion over painting or algebra is chiefly a matter of
concentration and self-forgetfulness. So dominion over the passions
changes them from attempts to appropriate anything into sentiments of
the mind, colouring a world which is no longer coveted. To attain such
autumnal wisdom is, if you like, itself a power of feeling and a kind of
strength; but it is not helpful in conquering the earth.
"Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His
talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a
harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. He did not crave in
the least either wealth or empire. What he loved was solitude, nature,
music, books. But his imagination, like his judgment, was captious; it
could not dwell on reality, but reacted furiously against it.
Accordingly, when he speaks of the will to be powerful, power is merely
an eloquent word on his lips. It symbolises the escape from mediocrity.
What power would be when attained and exercised remains entirely beyond
his horizon. What meets us everywhere is the sense of impotence and a
passionate rebellion against it.
"The phrases in which
Nietzsche condensed and felt his thought were brilliant, but they were
seldom just. We may perhaps see the principle of his ethics better if we
forget for a moment the will to be powerful and consider this: that he
knew no sort of good except the beautiful, and no sort of beauty except
romantic stress. He was a belated prophet of romanticism. He wrote its
epitaph, in which he praised it more extravagantly than anybody, when it
was alive, had had the courage to do.
"Consider, for
example, what he said about truth. Since men were governed solely by the
will to be powerful, the truth for its own sake must be moonshine to
them. They would wish to cultivate such ideas, whether true or false, as
might be useful to their ambition. Nietzsche (more candid in this than
some other pragmatists) confessed that truth itself did not interest
him; it was ugly; the bracing atmosphere of falsehood, passion, and
subjective perspectives was the better thing. Sometimes, indeed, a more
wistful mood overtook him, and he wondered whether the human mind would
be able to endure the light of truth. That was the great question of the
future. We may agree that a mind without poetry, fiction and subjective
colouring would not be human, nor a mind at all; and that neither truth
nor the knowledge of truth would have any intrinsic value if nobody
cared about it for its own sake. But some men do care; and in ignoring
this fact Nietzsche expresses the false and pitiful notion that we can
be interested in nothing except in ourselves and our own future. I am
solitary, says the romantic egotist, and sufficient unto myself. The
world is my idea, new every day: what can I have to do with truth?
"This impulse to turn one's back on truth, whether in contempt or in
despair, has a long history. Lessing had said that he preferred the
pursuit of truth to the truth itself; but if we take this seriously (as
possibly it was not meant) the pursuit of truth at once changes its
character. It can no longer be the pursuit of truth, truth not being
wanted, but only the pursuit of some fresh idea. Whether one of these
ideas or another comes nearer to the truth would be unimportant and
undiscoverable. Any idea will do, so long as it is pregnant with another
idea that may presently take its place; and as presumably error will
precipitate new ideas more readily than truth, we might almost find it
implied in Lessing's maxim that, as Nietzsche maintained, what is really
good is neither truth nor the pursuit of truth (for you might find it,
and what would you do then?), but rather a perpetual flux of errors.
"This view is also implied in the very prevalent habit of regarding
opinions as justified not by their object but by their date. The
intellectual ignominy of believing what we believe simply because of the
time and place of our birth, escapes many evolutionists. Far from
trying to overcome this natural prejudice of position, they raise it
into a point of pride. They declare all opinions ever held in the past
to be superseded, and are apparently content that their own should be
superseded to-morrow, but meantime they cover you with obloquy if you
are so backward or so forward as not to agree with them to-day. They
accept as inevitable the total dominion of the point of view. Each new
date, even in the life of an individual thinker, is expected by them to
mark a new phase of doctrine. Indeed, truth is an object which
transcendental philosophy cannot envisage: the absolute ego must be
satisfied with consistency. How should the truth, actual, natural, or
divine, be an expression of the living will that attempts, or in their
case despairs, to discover it? Yet that everything, even the truth, is
an expression of the living will, is the corner-stone of this
philosophy.
"Consider further the spirit which Nietzsche
condemned Christianity and the Christian virtues. Many people have
denounced Christianity on the ground that it was false or tyrannical,
while perhaps admitting that it was comforting or had a good moral
influence. Nietzsche denounced it -- and in unmeasured terms -- on the
ground that (while, of course, as true as any other vital lie) it was
mean, depressing, slavish, and plebian. How beastly was the precept of
love! Actually to love all these grotesque bipeds was degrading. A lover
of the beautiful must wish almost all his neighbours out of the way.
Compassion, too, was a lamentable way of assimilating oneself to evil.
That contagious misery spoiled one's joy, freedom, and courage. Disease
should not be nursed but cauterised; the world must be made clean.
"Now there is a sort of love of mankind, a jealous love of what man
might be, in this much decried maxim of unmercifulness. Nietzsche
rebelled at the thought of endless wretchedness, pervasive mediocrity,
crying children, domestic drudges, and pompous fools for ever.
Die Erde war zu lange schon ein Irrenhaus!
His heart was tender enough, but his imagination was impatient. When he
praised cruelty, it was on the ground that art was cruel, that it made
beauty out of suffering. Suffering, therefore, was good, and so was
crime, which made life keener. Only crime, he said, raises a man high
enough for the lightning to strike him. In the hope of sparing some
obscure person a few groans or tears, would you deprive the romantic
hero of so sublime a death?
"Christians, too, might say they
had their heroes, their saints; but what sort of eminence was that? It
was produced by stifling half the passions. A sister of charity could
not be an Arminius; devotion to such remedial offices spoilt the glory
of life. Holiness was immoral; it was a half-suicide.
All
experience, the ideal of Faust, was what a spirited man must desire.
All experience would involve, I suppose, passing through all the
sensations of a murderer, a maniac, and a toad; even through those of a
saint or a sister of charity. But the romantic mind despises results; it
is satisfied with poses...
"This egotism in morals is partly
mystical. There is a luxurious joy in healing the smart of evil in
one's mind, without needing to remove or diminish the evil in the world.
The smart may be healed by nursing the conviction that evil after all
is good, no matter how much of it there is or how much of it we do. In
part, however, this egotism is romantic; it does not ask to be persuaded
that evil, in the end, is good. It feels that evil is good in the
present; it is so intense a thing to feel and so exciting a thing to do.
Here we have what Nietzsche wished to bring about, a reversal of all
values. To do evil is the true virtue, and to be good is the most
hopeless vice. Milk is for babes; your strong man should be soaked in
blood and in alcohol. We should live perilously; and as material life is
the power to digest poisons, so true excellence is the power to commit
all manner of crimes, and to survive.
"That there is no God
is proved by Nietzsche pragmatically, on the ground that belief in the
existence of God would have made him uncomfortable. Not at all for the
reason that might first occur to us: to imagine himself a lost soul has
always been a point of pride with the romantic genius. The reason was
that if there had been any gods he would have found it intolerable not
to be a god himself. Poor Nietzsche! The laurels of the Almighty would
not let him sleep.
"It is hard to know if we should be more
deceived in taking these sallies seriously or in not taking them so. On
the one hand it all seems the swagger of an immature, half-playful mind,
like a child that tells you he will cut your head off. The dreamy
impulse, in its inception, is sincere enough, but there is no vestige of
any understanding of what it proposes, of its conditions, or of its
results. On the other hand these explosions are symptomatic; there stirs
behind them unmistakably an elemental force. That an attitude is
foolish, incoherent, disastrous, proves nothing against the depth of the
instinct that inspires it. Who could be more intensely unintelligent
than Luther or Rousseau? Yet the world followed them, not to turn back.
The molecular forces of society, so to speak, had already undermined the
systems which these men denounced. If the systems have survived it is
only because the reformers, in their intellectual helplessness, could
supply nothing to take their place. So Nietzsche, in his genial
imbecility, betrays the shifting of great subterranean forces. What he
said may be nothing, but the fact that he said it is all-important. Out
of such wild intuitions, because the heart of the child was in them, the
man of the future may have to build his philosophy. We should forgive
Nietzsche his boyish blasphemies. He hated with clearness, if he did not
know what to love."
3. The Superman
"In his views on matters of fact Nietzsche, as becomes the naive
egotist, was quite irresponsible. If he said the course of history
repeated itself in cycles, it was because the idea pleased him; it
seemed a symbol of self-approval on the world's part. If he hailed the
advent of a race of men superior to ourselves and of stronger fibre, it
was because human life as it is, and especially his own life, repelled
him. He was sensitive and, therefore, censorious. He gazed about him, he
gazed at himself, he remembered the disappointing frailties and
pomposity of the great man, Wagner, whom he had once idolised. His
optimism for the moment yielded to his sincerity. He would sooner
abolish than condone such a world, and he fled to some solitary hillside
by the sea, saying to himself that man was a creature to be superseded.
"Dissatisfaction with the actual is what usually leads people to frame
ideals at all, or at least to hold them fast; but such a negative motive
leaves the ideal vague and without consistency. If we could suddenly
have our will, we should very likely find the result trivial or
horrible. So the superman of Nietzsche might prove, if by magic he could
be realised. To frame solid ideals, which would, in fact, be better
than actual things, is not granted to the merely irritable poet; it is
granted only to the master-workman, to the modeller of some given
substance to some given use -- things which define his aspiration, and
separate what is relevant and glorious in his dreams from that large
part of them which is merely ignorant and peevish. It was not for
Nietzsche to be an artist in morals and to institute anything coherent,
even in idea.
"The superman of Nietzsche is rendered the more
chimerical by the fact that he must contradict not only the common man
of the present but also the superior men, the half-superhuman men, of
the past. To transcend humanity is no new ambition; that has always been
the effort of Indian and Christian religious discipline and of Stoic
philosophy. But this spiritual superiority, like that of artists and
poets, has come of abstraction; a superiority to life, in that these
minds were engrossed in the picture or lesson of life rather than in
living; and if they powerfully affected the world, as they sometimes
did, it was by bringing down into it something supermundane, the
arresting touch of an ulterior wisdom. Nietzsche, on the contrary, even
more than most modern philosophers, loved mere life with the pathetic
intensity of the wounded beast; his superman must not rise above our
common condition by his purely spiritual resources, or by laying up his
treasure in any sort of heaven. He must be not a superior man but a kind
of physiological superman, a griffin in soul, if not in body, who
instead of labouring hands and religious faith should have eagle's wings
and the claws of a lion. His powers should be superior to ours by
resembling those of fiercer and wilder animals. The things that make a
man tame -- Nietzsche was a retired professor living in a boarding-house
-- must be changed into their opposites. But man has been tamed by
agriculture, material arts, children, experience; therefore these things
are to be far from the superman. If he must resemble somebody, it will
rather be the
condottieri of
the renaissance or the princes and courtiers of the seventeenth century;
Caesar Borgia is the supreme instance. He must have a splendid presence
and address, gallantry, contempt for convention, loyalty to no country,
no woman, and no idea, but always a buoyant and lordly assertion of
instinct and of self. In the helter-skelter of his irritable genius,
Nietzsche jumbled together the ferocity of solitary beasts, the
indifference and
hauteur of patricians, and the antics of revellers, and out of that mixture he hoped to evoke the rulers of the coming age.
"How could so fantastic an ideal impose on a keen satirist like
Nietzsche and a sincere lover of excellence? Because true human
excellence seemed to him hostile to life, and he felt -- and this was
his strong and sane side, his lien on the future -- that life must be
accepted as it is or may become, and false beliefs, hollow demands, and
hypocritical, forced virtues must be abandoned. This new wisdom was that
which Goethe, too, had felt and practised; and of all masters of life
Goethe was the one whom Nietzsche could best understand. But a master of
life, without being in the least hostile to life, since he fulfils it,
nevertheless uses life for ends which transcend it. Even Goethe,
omnivorous and bland as he was, transcended life in depicting and
judging and blessing it. The saints and the true philosophers have
naturally emphasised more this renunciation of egotism: they have seen
all things in the light of eternity -- that is, as they are in truth --
and have consistently felt a reasonable contempt for mere living and
mere dying; and in that precisely lies moral greatness. Here Nietzsche
could not follow; rationality chilled him; he craved vehemence.
"How life can be fulfilled and made beautiful by reason was never
better shown than by the Greeks, both by precept and example. Nietzsche
in his youth was a professor of Greek literature: one would have
expected his superman to be a sort of Greek hero. Something of the
Dorian harshness in beauty, something of the Pindaric high-born and
silent victor may have been fused into Nietzsche's ideal; certainly
Bacchic freedom and ardour were to enter in. But on the whole it is
remarkable how little he learned from the Greeks, no modesty or
reverence, no joy in order and in loveliness, no sense for friendship,
none for the sanctity of places and institutions. He repeated the
paradoxes of some of their sophists, without remembering how their wise
men had refuted them. For example, he gave a new name and a new
prominence to the distinction between what he called the Dionysiac and
the Apollonian elements in Greek genius...He saw that a demonic force,
as the generation of Goethe called it, underlay everything; what he did
not see was that this demonic force was under control, which is the
secret of the whole matter. The point had been thoroughly elucidated by
Plato, in the contrast he drew between inspiration and art. But Plato
was rather ironical about inspiration, and had a high opinion of art;
and Nietzsche, with his contrary instinct, rushes away without
understanding the mind of the master or the truth of the situation. He
thinks he alone has discovered the divinity of Dionysus and of the
Muses, which Plato took as a matter of course but would not venerate
superstitiously. Inspiration, like will, is a force without which reason
can do nothing. Inspiration must be presupposed; but in itself it can
do nothing good unless it is in harmony with reason, or is brought into
harmony with it. This two-edged wisdom that makes impulse the stuff of
life and reason its criterion is, of course, lost on Nietzsche, and with
it the whole marvel of Greek genius. There is nothing exceptional in
being alive and impulsive; any savage can run wild and be frenzied and
enact histrionic passions: the virtue of the Greeks lay in the exquisite
firmness with which they banked their fires without extinguishing them,
so that their inner life remained human (indeed, remained infra-human,
like that of Nietzsche's superman) and yet became beautiful: they were
severe and fond of maxims, on a basis of universal tolerance; they
governed themselves rationally, with a careful freedom, while well aware
that nature and their own bosoms were full of gods, all of whom must be
reverenced.
"After all, this defect in appreciation is
inseparable from the transcendental pose. The ancients, like everything
else, never seem to the egotist a reality co-ordinate with himself, from
which he might still have something to learn. They are only so much
'content' for his self-consciousness, so much matter for his thought to
transcend. They can contain nothing for him but the part of his outgrown
self which deigns to identify with them. His mind must always envelop
them and be the larger thing. No wonder that in this school learning is
wasted for the purposes of moral education. Whoever has seen the learned
egotist flies at his approach. History in his hands is a demonstration
of his philosophy. Science is a quarry of proofs for his hobbies. If we
do not agree with him we are not merely mistaken (every philosopher
tells us that), but we are false to ourselves and ignorant of our ideal
significance. His ego gives us our place in the world. He informs us of
what we mean, whatever we may say; and he raises our opinions, as he
might his food, to a higher unity in his own person. He is priest in
every temple. He approaches a picture-gallery or a foreign religion in a
dictatorial spirit, with his
a priori categories ready on his lips; pedantry and vanity speak in his every gesture, and the lesson of nothing can reach his heart.
"No, neither the philosophy inherited by Nietzsche nor his wayward
imagination was fit to suggest to him a nobler race of men. On the
contrary, they shut him off from comprehension of the best men that have
existed. Like the utopias or ideals of many other satirists and minor
philosophers, the superman is not a possibility, it is only a protest.
Our society is outworn, but hard to renew; the emancipated individual
needs to master himself. In what spirit or to what end he will do so, we
do not know, and Nietzsche cannot tell us. He is the jester, to whom
all incoherences are forgiven, because all indiscretions are allowed.
His mind is undisciplined, and his tongue outrageous, but he is at
bottom the friend of our conscience, and full of shrewd wit and tender
wisps of intuition. Behind his 'gay wisdom' and trivial rhymes lies a
great anguish. His intellect is lost in a chaos. His heart denies itself
the relief of tears and can vent itself only in forced laughter and
mock hopes that gladden nobody, least of all himself."