Nietzsche's influence upon professional philosophers is comparatively
weak. Whenever mentioned by them, it is in criticism, and he is
generally set aside as onesided, and perhaps justly, because he was
truly no philosopher in the strict sense of the word. He was no
reasoner, no logician, and we can not, properly speaking, look upon
his philosophy as a system or even a systematized view of the world.
Nietzsche made himself the exponent of a tendency, and as such he has
his followers among large masses of those very people whom he despised
as belonging to the herds. As Nietzsche idealized this very quality
in which he was lacking, so his followers recruit themselves from the
ranks of those people who more than all others would be opposed to the
rule of the overman. His most ardent followers are among the nihilists
of Russia, the socialists and anarchists of all civilized countries.
The secret reason of attraction, perhaps unknown to themselves, seems
to be Nietzsche's defense of the blind impulse and the privilege which
he claims for the overman to be himself in spite of law and order and
morality, and also his contempt for rules, religious, philosophical,
ethical or even logical, that would restrict the great sovereign
passion for power.
Nietzsche's philosophy has taken a firm hold of a number of souls
who rebel against the social, the political, the religious, and even
the scientific, conditions of our civilization. Nietzsche is the
philosopher of protest, and, strange to say, while he himself is
aristocratic in his instincts, he appeals most powerfully to the masses
of the people.
Nietzsche's disciples are not among the aristocrats, not among the
scholars, not among the men of genius. His followers are among
the people who believe in hatred and hail him as a prophet of the
great deluge. His greatest admirers are anarchists, sometimes also
socialists, and above all those geniuses who have failed to find
recognition. Nietzsche's thought will prove veritable dynamite if it
should happen to reach the masses of mankind, the disinherited, the
uneducated, the proletariat, the Catilinary existences. Nietzsche's
philosophy is an intoxicant to those whom he despised most; they see in
him their liberator, and rejoice in his invectives.
Invectives naturally appeal to those who are as unthinking as the
brutes of the field, but feel the sufferings of existence as much as
do the beasts of burden. They are impervious to argument, but being
full of bitterness and envy they can be led most easily by any kind
of denunciations of their betters. Nietzsche hated the masses, the
crowd of the common people, the herd. He despised the lowly and had
a contempt for the ideals of democracy. Nevertheless, his style of
thought is such as to resemble the rant of the leaders of mobs, and
it is quite probable that in the course of time he will become the
philosopher of demagogues.