George Burman Foster

In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.

Answer is “No!” said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.

It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau’s “No.” Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart’s abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.

Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.

The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet’s heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether “the idea was that man was to go on all fours again.” In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.

Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them—a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,—a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also—the man of “the golden mean,” the “man of sanity,” as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who “hates ultra.” For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a “reasonable” man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters!

Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us.

Hence Nietzsche lunged against status quo. He did what he himself called “unzeitmÄssig,” untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time—more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how man fared in this culture—the question as to what man got out of it and as to what it got out of man.

Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of “happiness” at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian “happiness morality”: “I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my work.”

No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a “culture of the earth, or of man?” Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, man must be the decisive thing; man must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, et id omne genus, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for “culture,” but culture for man; of man, by man, for man.

Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero’s warning: “Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay.” But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe’s “flat country”—flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling—up to an appreciation of the potential—not the actual—greatness of man’s life. Greatness is not yet man’s verity but his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man’s strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say I will is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this I will. To produce men who can say I will is at once the task and the test of culture. This I will is the climax and goal of man. In this I will vanishes every fearsome and disquieting I must, every compulsion of outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been written or thought or done. “And thou, O lord, art more than they!” Thou—thou alone—art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable. “Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!”

But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men, personality-men! Such men are not Gegenwartsmenschen, present day men, but Zukunftsmenschen, future day men; not reality but task—our task. That future man will surpass present man as much as present man surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man, shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied—vainly we may now hope—in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?

Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not Vaterland, but Kinderland, must be our concern. Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.