Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello
Nietzsche · en
His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had
Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his
Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of
moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged
superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith
still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The
path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's
own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both
men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed
by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights
a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible,
but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile,
fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power"
in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared
to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a
healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche
was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war
harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his
abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in
narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal
bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health.
Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and
his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of
joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His
famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever
nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.