Aristocratic Radicalism

Brandes says that Nietzsche began as Schopenhauer's disciple, freed himself, and concentrated step by step on a single question, the value of moral values, culminating in the planned Transvaluation of all Values, left unfinished when his illness struck.

Brandes explains Nietzsche's 'Culture-Philistine': the self-satisfied educated man who mistakes uniform conventional opinion for culture, which Nietzsche calls fortified barbarism, a morass in which all endeavour languishes and into which we are all born.

Brandes argues that the young person who would become himself needs an educator who liberates rather than imposes dogma, contrasting this with Kierkegaard, whose call to become an individual still ended in a 'Thou shalt believe' and the return of the herd.

Brandes sets out the young Nietzsche's view that the goal of humanity lies in its highest specimens, that culture means working to produce single great men, and that a life acquires its highest value by being lived for the rarest examples of the race; he aligns this with Renan and Flaubert and opposes it to Hartmann's negative world process and to the happiness of the greatest number.

Brandes quotes Nietzsche's early formula that humanity's sole task is the production of solitary great men.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's aristocratic objection to history written from the standpoint of the masses: the masses are only bad copies, foils or tools of great individuals, and the highest never affects them, so a religion's mass success testifies against its founder's greatness.

Brandes says that Nietzsche rejected both historical optimism and Schopenhauer's renouncing pessimism, seeking in the Greeks a pessimism of strength and exuberant power; read from his later standpoint, the Dionysian was already his counter-principle to a morality hostile to Nature and to Christianity.

Brandes reads Nietzsche as an enthusiast who knew his own masterful bias and held that humanity has not outgrown commanding and obeying, yet who in ethics condemned modern morality for exalting obedience instead of the power to dictate one's own morality.

Brandes says that war service hardened Nietzsche against softness and turned him from Schopenhauer's pity and Wagner's romanticism, and that his long illness freed him from piety and pessimism ('a sufferer has no right to pessimism'), made him a philosopher who questioned every value, and issued in a convalescent's passionate joy in life and creation.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's argument that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that great joys require great sufferings, and his aristocratic attack on happiness for the greatest number; Brandes objects that common miseries such as hunger and exhausting labour bring no compensating joys.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's argument that praised unselfishness is good for the neighbour and community but harmful to the self-sacrificer, and that the neighbour who wants to be loved unselfishly is himself not unselfish.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's view that morality's value lies in prolonged constraint and obedience addressed to peoples, not individuals; that universal precepts like Kant's imperative fail because every act is unique; that we must create new tables of values; and that the exceptional man gives style to his character and becomes his own lawgiver, while the dissatisfied avenge themselves with virtuous precepts.

Brandes quotes Nietzsche's maxim that the one thing needful is to give style to one's character.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's account that morality was long mere obedience to venerable custom, that cruelty was humanity's oldest festal joy, offered even to the gods, whence self-torture came to be valued, and that Christianity unceasingly preached the torture of souls.

Brandes reports that Nietzsche, following Hartmann's lead, attacks Schopenhauer's morality of pity: pity is not unselfish but mixed with fear, comparison and the joy of being the stronger, real fellow-suffering would only multiply suffering, and against 'love thy neighbour' he sets aims beyond the neighbour, holding pity captive for the sake of the goal.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's theory, built on Rée's evidence, that 'good' first meant noble and powerful, opposed to 'bad' as low, while the oppressed out of hatred and revenge created the opposition good–evil in which the former good become the evil; Brandes illustrates it with the Vikings' 'eagle ideal' and their victims' ideal of the lamb.

Brandes summarises Nietzsche's contrast: noble morality is continual yea-saying, slave morality a continual 'Thou shalt not'.

Brandes reports that Nietzsche traces false modern morality to spite, envy and rancune, which renamed impotence as goodness, baseness as humility, submission as obedience, and hatred as the hope for God's kingdom and the victory of righteousness.

Brandes judges that as a picture of historical Christianity Nietzsche's account is an eighteenth-century-style caricature, but that it does hit a type of apostle of spite-morality and vigorously unmasks the self-deception beneath moral preaching.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's genealogy: man's nobility lies in answering for himself, the sovereign man's conscience; memory for promises was burnt into him by frightful punishments; guilt originates as debt in the creditor–debtor relation, whose compensation was the pleasure of making the powerless suffer; and society stands to its members as creditor to debtor.

Brandes says that Nietzsche defines man as an animal that can make and keep promises.

Brandes judges that Nietzsche brought no fresh proof against the derivation of justice from resentment, that his excess of passion comes from its link with modern democracy, and that, ignoring feud among equals, he scorns the slave caste's morality while revelling in and excusing the ruling caste's delight in power.

Brandes reports that for Nietzsche there is no right or wrong in itself, since life is essentially exploitation aimed at power, and that he replaces Schopenhauer's will to life and Darwin's struggle for existence with the will to power, life seeking self-increase rather than preservation; Brandes objects that there is no difference of principle, since the struggle for existence necessarily becomes a fight for power.

Brandes argues that Nietzsche, loving struggle for its own sake, counts as progress only the rearing of a higher, stronger species, the Superman, even at the sacrifice of masses, and that this vision so resembles Renan's half-jesting dream of a manufactory of gods that Renan's influence can scarcely be doubted, though Nietzsche turned it into dogma and never credited him.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's hypothesis that the bad conscience arose when warlike instincts, imprisoned by a state founded through conquest, turned inward; guilt then became debt to ancestors and gods, culminating in the Christian God, original sin and the God who pays the debt with his own blood, so that man's Nay to his nature becomes a Yea to God and the Beyond.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's account of the ascetic ideal as a sick life's device for self-preservation: the sick ascetic priest herds the despairing, redirects their resentment inward by reinterpreting suffering as sin, and drugs them with apathy, labour, small joys and congregation; as yet the ideal has no real assailant, though a new ideal is forming that sees suffering as a condition of happiness.

Brandes says that Thus Spake Zarathustra was written in four parts in 1883–85, each in about ten days and conceived on long walks with a feeling of inspiration, and that its hero, form and the eagle and serpent are borrowed from the Persian Avesta's Zoroaster.

Brandes calls Zarathustra Nietzsche's doctrine in the form of religion, a book of edification for free spirits; he disputes Nietzsche's ranking of it highest, finding its imagination insufficiently inventive and its typological manner monotonous, but praises its powerful style and pure mountain mood and calls it a good, deep book for the few practised in great contempt and great love of man.

Brandes summarises Zarathustra's disgust with the petty virtues that make men smaller, his being called godless, the apostasy of his former companions, and his loathing of the great city and of the State.

Brandes restates Zarathustra's teaching that the State is the coldest of monsters whose lie is that it is the people, whereas creators made peoples; the State is for the many-too-many, and only where it ceases does the man who is a bridge to the Superman begin.

Brandes says that Zarathustra's greatest danger among men lay in forbearance and pity, which taught him to lie among the good, and that he returns to the free mountain air to sit among broken and half-written tables awaiting the hour when the lion comes with the doves.

Brandes paraphrases maxims of Zarathustra's new tables: spare not thy neighbour, there is no requital, beware of the good who never speak the truth, a new nobility that loves its children's land and so redeems the past, trial marriages, push what is falling, reserve oneself for worthier foes, and the creators are hard.

Brandes says that no doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than the vanity of life, that he prefers pain to annihilation, and that the same love of life fills Lou von Salomé's Hymn to Life, set by Nietzsche, which thirsts even for the cup of pain and outdoes Achilles' choice of life on earth.

Brandes calls Zarathustra's eternal recurrence a somewhat shallow mysticism derived from the Pythagorean cycle and Ecclesiastes, the direct antithesis of Hartmann's world process ending in destruction, and notes that Blanqui and Le Bon advanced the same idea about the same time.

Brandes defines dance in Nietzsche's language as the lofty lightness of mind exalted above the gravity of earth and all stupid seriousness, introducing the Second Dance Song in which Zarathustra dances with Life as a woman.

Brandes says that the midnight clock's song closing the Second Dance Song, interpreted line by line in Part IV, concentrates Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine in its shortest formula: joy and woe are inseparable, saying Yea to one joy is saying Yea to all woe, and all joy wants deep eternity.

Brandes argues that Nietzsche, like Hartmann, denies the possibility of equality and peace because life is inequality and war, praising the good war that hallows every cause, and that both reflect the militarism of the new German Empire, Nietzsche differing only in wanting war so that manliness may not die out.

Brandes judges that Nietzsche's attacks on women and emancipation echo Schopenhauer and old-world Germany, carry a personal note of painful experience and of the thinker's need for solitude and unfitness for marriage, and are a brutal unfairness to which Mill's emancipatory fairness is greatly preferable.

Brandes says that Nietzsche crept into solitude to find himself, as Zarathustra into his cave, lost all external measure of his worth, and that the lack and then the first glimmer of recognition so swelled his self-esteem that it finally closed over his head.

Brandes says that his 1889 essay was the first substantial study of Nietzsche in Europe, and that within a few years Nietzsche became the fashionable philosopher everywhere, with a compromising school of followers and opponents such as Stein and Nordau, while he himself lived on insane and unaware.

Brandes insists he was never Nietzsche's adherent: mature readers study Nietzsche not to adopt or propagate his opinions but as sceptics in search of a man.