  Nietzsche was an individualist, a hater of the State and of the Prussians, a sick man, a great artist in words to be read with delight and—your tongue in your cheek. By quaint irony his central idea, “the ego-rampant,” was temperamentally suited to those Prussians whom he hated. The Neo-German conception of the State, (if one may fairly judge it out of the mouths of certain Germans) as a law unto itself, demanding all from the individuals who compose it, and taking all it can get from the world at large, may be inverted Nietzscheism, but it is the creature of Prussian history, and of very different men. It is based on what we others, and I should imagine many Germans, think is a transient and false notion of what States should be. We say they should not roam the earth considering only their own strength. True that, in the absence as yet of the system of group-States, States still can seize here or seize there, if they be strong enough, but we emphatically deny that they should do so on principle, as the new German philosophy seems to teach, and set the robber’s ideal, the robber’s fashion of morality, for the individuals who compose those States. The philosophy, not only of the rest of Europe, but of Germany, before all, in the days of Kant and Hegel, presumed that the hard-won morality of individuals amongst themselves would ultimately become the morality of States. “The fact that the sense of community among the peoples of the earth has gone so far that the violation of right in one place is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a Citizenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a necessary extension of the unwritten Code of States and Peoples.” (Kant.) “The binding cord is not force, but the deep-seated feeling of order that is possessed by us all.” (Hegel.) The new German philosophy has anointed the present immorality of States and thereby fixed it as the morality for individuals. I think these philosophers in their characteristic German exuberance, with its habit of over-statement, have been hard on Germany. For the German people at large have presumably been acquiring throughout the ages some such instincts toward altruism as the peoples of other countries. The new German philosophy has succeeded to a dismal extent in its inoculation of the German people, but it cannot in the long run impose its logical ideal of the wild man in the forest, though never so gorgeously decked out, on the Germans, any more than the old German philosophy made the Germans replicas of Christ. Man never attains to his philosophical ideal; but it is just as well that he should see clearly its apotheosis before he tries too hard to reach it. |
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