Nietzsche

The atmosphere of our times – the collective values of decent people – enters so deeply into our assumptions that we almost stop noticing. Nietzsche was keen on shocking his readers, firing off a string of incredibly hostile insights against the very things which we assume we must revere: democracy, the importance of pity and compassion, the value of community, the pursuit of the common good. The use of these cruel assertions is to let us try out, even if only for a few minutes, what it would be like not to share the basic assumptions of our times.

Talking of people as ‘herds’ as Nietzsche does in the following extract can come across as mean. But it is the risk he takes in order to jolt us into recognition of some unpalatable but serious thoughts. Maybe at times we are a bit too preoccupied with fitting in; maybe we have in some ways become timid, in our fear of confrontation. Obviously, this does not apply to everyone: what useful lesson could? The underlying question is this: does fear rule your life too much? Are your ideas about life mainly ways of protecting yourself?

Inasmuch as ever since there have been human beings there have also been human herds (family groups, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches), and always very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command – considering, that is to say, that hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience, it is fair to suppose that as a rule a need for it is by now innate as a kind of formal conscience which commands: ‘Thou shalt unconditionally do this, unconditionally not do that’, in short ‘Thou shalt’. This need seeks to be satisfied and to fill out its form with a content; in doing so it grasps about wildly, according to the degree of its strength, impatience and tension, with little discrimination, as a crude appetite, and accepts whatever any commander – parent, teacher, law, class prejudice, public opinion – shouts in its ears. The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we think of this instinct taken to its ultimate extravagance there would be no commanders or independent men at all; or, if they existed, they would suffer from a bad conscience and in order to be able to command would have to practise a deceit upon themselves: the deceit, that is, that they too were only obeying. This state of things actually exists in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands (commands of ancestors, of the constitution, of justice, of the law or even of God), or even to borrow herd maxims from the herd’s way of thinking and appear as ‘the first servant of the people’ for example, or as ‘instruments of the common good’. On the other hand, the herd-man in Europe today makes himself out to be the only permissible kind of man and glorifies the qualities through which he is tame, peaceable and useful to the herd as the real human virtues: namely public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, forbearance, pity.

(Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

It is hardly a bad list. His point is that it misses out too much. He is probing the trade-off we make between the desire for domestic peace and quiet and the will to argue, struggle, demand, order, fight.

So long as the utility which dominates moral value judgements is solely that which is useful to the herd, so long as the object is solely the preservation of the community and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively in that which seems to imperil the existence of the community: so long as that is the case there can be no ‘morality of love of one’s neighbour’. Supposing that even there a constant little exercise of consideration, pity, fairness, mildness, mutual aid was practised, supposing that even at that stage of society all those drives are active which are later honourably designated ‘virtues’ and are finally practically equated with the concept ‘morality’: in that era they do not yet by any means belong to the domain of moral valuations – they are still extra-moral. An act of pity, for example, was during the finest age of Rome considered neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral; and even if it was commended, this commendation was entirely compatible with a kind of involuntary disdain, as soon, that is, as it was set beside any action which served the welfare of the whole, of the res publica. Ultimately ‘love of one’s neighbour’ is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one’s neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one’s neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprise, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility – under different names, naturally, from those chosen here – but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous – now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking – and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one’s feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust; ‘the lamb’, even more ‘the sheep’, is held in higher and higher respect. There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair – certainly the idea of ‘being punished’ and ‘having to punish’ is unpleasant to it, makes it afraid. ‘Is it not enough to render him harmless? Why punish him as well? To administer punishment is itself dreadful!’ With this question herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate conclusion. Supposing all danger, the cause of fear, could be abolished, this morality would therewith also be abolished: it would no longer be necessary, it would no longer regard itself as necessary! – He who examines the conscience of the present-day European will have to extract from a thousand moral recesses and hiding places always the same imperative, the imperative of herd timidity: ‘We wish for the day that there will no longer be anything to fear!’ One day everywhere in Europe the way to that day is now called ‘progress’…

We know well enough how offensive it sounds when someone says plainly and without metaphor that man is an animal; but it will be reckoned almost a crime in us that precisely in regard to men of ‘modern ideas’ we constantly employ the terms ‘herd’, ‘herd instinct’, and the like. But what of that! We can do no other: for it is precisely here that our new insight lies. We have found that in all principal moral judgements Europe has become unanimous, including the lands where Europe’s influence predominates: one manifestly knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did not know, and what that celebrated old serpent once promised to teach – one ‘knows’ today what is good and evil. Now it is bound to make a harsh sound and one not easy for ears to hear when we insist again and again: that which here believes it knows, that which here glorifies itself with its praising and blaming and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herd-animal man: the instinct which has broken through and come to predominate and prevail over the other instincts and is coming to do so more and more in proportion to the increasing physiological approximation and assimilation of which it is the symptom. Morality is in Europe today herd-animal morality – that is to say, as we understand the thing, only one kind of human morality beside which, before which, after which many other, above all higher, moralities are possible or ought to be possible. But against such a ‘possibility’, against such an ‘ought’, this morality defends itself with all its might: it says, obstinately and stubbornly: ‘I am morality itself, and nothing is morality besides me!’ – Indeed, with the aid of a religion which has gratified and flattered the sublimest herd-animal desires, it has got to the point where we discover even in political and social institutions an increasingly evident expression of this morality: the democratic movement inherits the Christian. But that the tempo of this movement is much too slow and somnolent for the more impatient, for the sick and suffering of the said instinct, is attested by the ever more frantic baying, the ever more undisguised fang-baring of the anarchist dogs which now rove the streets of European culture: apparently the reverse of the placidly industrious democrats and revolutionary ideologists, and even more so of the stupid philosophasters and brotherhood fanatics who call themselves socialists and want a ‘free society’. They are in fact at one with them all in their total and instinctive hostility towards every form of society other than that of the autonomous herd (to the point of repudiating even the concepts ‘master’ and ‘servant’ – ni dieu ni maître says a socialist formula –); at one in their tenacious opposition to every special claim, every special right and privilege (that is to say, in the last resort to every right: for when everyone is equal no one will need any ‘rights’); at one in their mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were an assault on the weaker, an injustice against the necessary consequence of all previous society); but equally at one in the religion of pity, in sympathy with whatever feels, lives, suffers (down as far as the animals, up as far, as ‘God’ the extravagance of ‘pity for God’ belongs in a democratic era); at one, one and all, in the cry and impatience of pity, in mortal hatred for suffering in general, in their almost feminine incapacity to remain spectators of suffering, to let suffer; at one in their involuntary gloom and sensitivity, under whose spell Europe seems threatened with a new Buddhism; at one in their faith in the morality of mutual pity, as if it were morality in itself and the pinnacle, the attained pinnacle of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the present and the great redemption from all the guilt of the past – at one, one and all, in their faith in the community as the saviour, that is to say in the herd, in ‘themselves’…

(Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

Nietzsche pushed the point even further in a later book called The Gay Science, 1882. (The title signifies ‘joyful knowledge’ – the knowledge that helps us to be cheerful and to remain in good spirits, in the face of the troubles life throws at us.)

I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honour to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day – the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

(The Gay Science, 1882)

The first instinct is, perhaps, to recoil from the very mention of war. But Nietzsche is not submitting an eccentric report to the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon. Rather, to get beauty and wisdom to prevail in the world is a task like a war, requiring the same level of devotion and the same degree of mobilization of resources and effort.

To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism – human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for – equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings! For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!

(The Gay Science, 1882)

Of course, brave and experimental thinking does not help you fit in. Nietzsche tries to imagine the kind of friends he needs: