The Philosophy of Friedrich NietzscheMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Philosophy, German -- 19th century
We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche--the argument, to
wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be
well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the
world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps,
is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile
but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche.[6] Mr. More goes back
to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as
Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So
long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine
effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that
was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral,
and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed
to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when
that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take
its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of
good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon
sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort
to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its
grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of
good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the
other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following,
the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated,
under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end,
the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian
sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality
of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the
whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough,
raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its
fruits were diverse and memorable--the romantic movement in Germany,
humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most
important of all, Socialism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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