The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's works of 1878-1882 were purely destructive preparation, showing that moral ideas are vulnerable, that the Christian ideal of humility weakens mankind, and that all notions of good and evil are mutable, so that the ground was cleared for a reconstruction.

Mencken says that Zarathustra was the first structure Nietzsche reared after clearing the ground, a half-poetical, half-philosophical rhapsody whose hero borrows only the name of the Persian law-giver, with no likeness to Persian philosophy.

Mencken describes Zarathustra as a remote sage attended by a snake and an eagle whose discourses recall the biblical rhapsodists, and argues that toward the end Nietzsche indulges in blasphemy, with a parody of the last supper, the disciples' worship of a jackass, and Wagner and other enemies appearing thinly veiled as buffoons.

Mencken says that the superman, the idea most associated with Nietzsche, is the natural child of The Birth of Tragedy and binds his whole work into one consistent whole, and records that Parts I-II appeared in 1883, Part III in 1884, Part IV circulated privately in 1885 and was published only in 1892, the book being conceived in the Engadine and written in Genoa, Sils Maria, Nice and Mentone.

Mencken argues, citing Zarathustra's account of the tables of many peoples, that every moral code is a changing expression of a people's expediency and will to power, that a people's god merely reflects its current ideas, and that the Ten Commandments are no more immutable than acts of Parliament.

Mencken argues that because morality is relative it is the antithesis of truth, and that Nietzsche therefore rejected all fixed moral codes and all gods, priests and rulers, holding that a man should replace 'good and evil' with his own valuations of good and bad, judging every act by its effect on his own welfare and that of his children.

Mencken explains, quoting Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy, that Nietzsche held all life to be at bottom exploitation and will to power, so that injury and annihilation cannot in themselves be wrong and the rights of others are only compromises for the benefit of the mass.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche called himself an immoralist because progress depends on truth, and pictures the ideal immoralist, the 'blond beast', as guided by instinct and intelligence rather than god and commandments, free of sin and hell, and thus a powerful force for truth against superstition.

Mencken argues that under minimal government, free of communistic levelling, such a man would stand forth from the herd, that church and king oppose progress, and that Nietzsche was therefore an anarchist in the true sense, like Spencer and Schopenhauer.

Mencken says that Nietzsche's immoralism needed a standard and a goal, and that Nietzsche supplied the standard by defining good as all that heightens the feeling of power and bad as all that proceeds from weakness, happiness being the feeling that power increases and resistance is overcome.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche offers a gospel of intelligent selfishness and absolute individualism, citing Zarathustra on loving oneself rather than one's neighbour, and an aristocracy that sacrifices the masses as scaffolding for a higher race under the law of natural selection.

Mencken argues that for Nietzsche instinct and experiment reveal one's power, that happiness lies in unrestrained yielding to the will to power through constant contest, citing Zarathustra's 'not to peace, but to victory' and casting dice with death, and that this means a crusade against ethics of self-sacrifice for inferiors and a transvaluation that frees the will to power from infamy.

Mencken argues, quoting Zarathustra's reply to the market-place crowd that God is dead, that belief in equality and brotherhood is the mob-morality of the ancient Jews credited to their god, and that since educated men no longer believe in that god it is ridiculous to keep the ethics grounded on him.

Mencken says that critics mocked Nietzsche as an iconoclast who destroyed without rebuilding, and that Zarathustra (from April 1883) was his answer: the superman, to whom man is a bridge from the ape, the meaning of the earth to which men must stay faithful instead of seeking rewards beyond the stars.

Mencken argues that the superman will be perfect in body and mind, delight in combat, say yes to life's pleasures and ills, be scornful, merciless and free of fear of gods and laws, owe nothing to his neighbours and sacrifice himself only for generations unborn; he will distinguish instinct from passion and renounce from expediency, as Zarathustra's sayings to the brethren and to the higher men are taken to show.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche never gave a definite picture of the superman and that commentators who take him as a 'blond beast' brute are wrong, as the three metamorphoses show: the camel is man bearing morality, the lion is the higher man who casts it off and frees the will to power, and the child, innocent and ideally adapted, is the superman.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche made the improvement of the body the first step of progress, that the superman's freed will to live will be refined by natural selection into an accurate instinct, summed up in Zarathustra's 'Be hard!', and that unlike Schopenhauer, Comte and the humanitarians Nietzsche held man to be of the earth, rising only after casting off transcendental morality.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche offered eternal recurrence to answer what follows the superman: the universe moves in cosmic cycles in which man rises to superman and beyond, then dissolves into the elements, and the whole process begins again.

Mencken says the idea came from the Pythagoreans, that its horror gripped Nietzsche, who according to Lou Andreas-Salomé spoke of it only in a low voice, and that he hoped to confirm it through atomic science until he concluded science gave no ground for it, after which his horror left him.

Mencken judges that eternal recurrence was not original with Nietzsche and that his philosophy and reputation would have been better had he never tried to elucidate it.

Mencken says that in Zarathustra Nietzsche treats recurrence as a philosophical speculation that well-nigh drives the prophet mad, quoting the passage in which Zarathustra will return with this sun, earth, eagle and serpent to the same life, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche turned recurrence into a device for exalting the superman, who knows his struggles will repeat endlessly yet, immune to pleasure and pain, faces and affirms it as part of life ('let us love it!'); Mencken accepts Vernon Lee's comparison with stoicism but rejects her likening it to Christian Science's denial of pain.

Mencken judges that, although Nietzsche found no factual support for it, eternal recurrence is not unthinkable, since astronomy's hypothesis of cosmic cycles from gas to solid and back makes it easily conceivable.

Mencken argues that recurrence makes the superman heroic, saying yes to life, and that Nietzsche's epistemology was a thorough-going empiricism: the superman is a materialist who knows mind only as a function of body, trusts instinct and senses, seeks knowledge of how rather than why, and is in the highest sense a utilitarian.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's 'I am a dionysian! I am an immoralist!' means an ideal of facing life's horrors unafraid, slaying great enemies and bearing one's own burdens, and that this individualism appears in the homely sayings of every vigorous people.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's chief service was not historical or dogmatic criticism but his answer to the claim that Christianity made the world better: Nietzsche held it made the world worse, being cruel, degrading and the most dangerous system of slave-morality, which bans the fundamental instincts of the highest type of man.

Mencken explains Nietzsche's view that Christian humility, the Golden Rule and sympathy make a man throw away his strength and his 'feeling of increasing power'; sympathy is a depressant that preserves what is ripe for extinction and, disguised as 'the other world', is hostile to life.

Mencken summarises Nietzsche's definition of sympathy as the strong man giving up some of his strength to the weak.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche was a thorough-going biological monist who held man to be merely an animal under the law of natural selection, and credits him as a pioneer of this view before Haeckel.

Mencken reads Nietzsche as seeing that Christian self-sacrifice defies natural selection and weakens the race, that mankind survives only because almost no one practises Christianity absolutely, and that abandoning self-sacrifice would yield a race of supermen who say 'yes' to the world.

Mencken states that for Nietzsche abandoning self-sacrifice would produce a race of supermen, dionysians who say yes to the world.

Mencken reports Nietzsche's account of Christianity as the revenge of the Jews, who foisted their slave-morality on their masters, and judges this idea 'sheer lunacy', an instance of wild German speculation.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche distinguished present from eternal truth and believed the will to power in higher men is an instinct for truth that grows more accurate over time, so that errors diminish until, with truth supreme, the superman would walk the earth.

Mencken says Nietzsche held that the superman would appear once truth reigned and errors were gone.

Mencken explains Nietzsche's later teaching that each man should pit his own feelings against majority law and that chronic skepticism is the proper attitude, quoting 'Zarathustra is a skeptic.... Convictions are prisons', and that the need for belief is a sign of weakness.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's loathing of the masses follows from their incapacity for original thought, so that whatever the majority believes aroused his suspicion ('What everybody believes is never true'), a view Mencken says historians of ideas share.

Mencken explains that Nietzsche rejected free will, holding that responsibility was invented to justify punishment and that Christianity is 'a hangman's metaphysic', and that denying God and responsibility restores the innocence of man's existence.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche fell into the trap of atheistic determinism: denying that the will is free while spending his life urging men, like a prophet, to change their ways.

Mencken argues that critics who condemn Nietzsche as blasphemous miss the point, since Nietzsche deliberately made his accusations against Christian morality as offensive as possible to provoke a public defence.

Mencken rejects Max Nordau's dismissal of Nietzsche as degenerate and insane, arguing that deviation is not morbidity and that an idea must be judged on its own soundness, not by the sanity of its author; though Nietzsche died insane, his principal doctrines are not a maniac's fantasies.

Mencken answers Nordau's charge that Nietzsche tore down without building up, asserting that no man left a more comprehensive system of ethics and that his fundamental principles stayed clear and substantially unchanged, while reform is in any case the work of many men in series.

Mencken reviews critics who defend Christian charity and humility (Bennett Hume, Fouillée, Violet Paget) and argues that scientific humanitarianism owes nothing to the church, that strength grows by use, and that Paget's humility is really intelligent egoism, which Nietzsche's higher man, knowing times for truce and guile, does not oppose.

Mencken argues that self-sacrifice based frankly on expediency is compatible with Nietzsche's philosophy, but that it is almost always corrupted by sentimentality, which exalts the unfit ('Blessed are the poor') and turns charity into an agent of decay.

Mencken argues, following Nietzsche, that there is no 'natural morality' engraved on the human heart; brotherly love is merely the moral fashion of the age, and Nietzsche showed that the 'good' of one race and age is the 'bad' of another, so no innate instinct for self-sacrifice bars his philosophy.

Mencken reports Paul Elmer More's objection that, while humanitarian sympathy has been excessive, unchecked self-seeking would lead to savagery, so that if one must choose, sympathy is preferable because it can never be fully realised.

Mencken argues that critics err in assuming Nietzsche wanted all men to abandon Christian morality; he addressed only the commanding minority, wished to restore Hume's dualism by dignifying self-interest against sympathy, and was content for the masses to keep their narcotic morality, envisioning only supermen at the top.

Mencken asserts that Nietzsche envisioned supermen only at the top of society, not all mankind converted.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's philosophy was wholly aristocratic: he sought to free superior men from false notions of duty and sin, to 'make man innocent', but meant by man only the higher man of tomorrow, holding the masses in contempt and writing 'for the lords of the earth'.