The Story of Philosophy

The trouble with Germany is a certain stolidity of mind which pays for this solidity of character; Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. “I believe only in French culture, and I regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a misunderstanding.” “When one reads Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, . . . Vauvenargues, and Chamfort, one is nearer to antiquity than with any group of authors in any other nation.” Voltaire is “a grand seigneur of the mind”; and Taine is “the first of living historians.” Even the later French writers Flaubert, Bourget, Anatole France, etc.—are infinitely beyond other Europeans in clarity of thought and language—“what clearness and delicate precision in these Frenchmen!” European nobility of taste, feeling and manners is the work of France. But of the old France, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Revolution, by destroying the aristocracy, destroyed the vehicle and nursery of culture, and now the French soul is thin and pale in comparison with what it used to be. Nevertheless it has still some fine qualities; “in France almost all psychological and artistic questions are considered with incomparably more subtlety and thoroughness than they are in Germany . . . . At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance in the world of culture.”⁸⁸

Russia is the blond beast of Europe. Its people have a “stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives them even nowadays the advantage over us Westerners.” Russia has a strong government, without “parliamentary imbecility.” Force of will has long been accumulating there, and now threatens to find release; it would not be surprising to find Russia becoming master of Europe. “A thinker who has at heart the future of Europe will in all his perspectives concerning the future calculate upon the Jews and the Russians as above all the surest and the likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces.” But all in all it is the Italians who are the finest and most vigorous of existing peoples; the man-plant grows strongest in Italy, as Alfieri boasted. There is a manly bearing, an aristocratic pride in even the lowliest Italian; “a poor Venetian gondolier is always a better figure than a Berlin Geheimrath, and in the end, indeed, a better man.”⁸⁹

Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; “shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together.” English utilitarianism and philistinism are the nadir of European culture. Only in a land of cutthroat competition could anyone conceive of life as a struggle for mere existence. Only in a land where shop-keepers and ship-keepers had multiplied to such a number as to overcome the aristocracy could democracy be fabricated; this is the gift, the Greek gift, which England has given the modern world. Who will rescue Europe from England, and England from democracy?

VIII. Aristocracy

Democracy means drift; it means permission given to each part of an organism to do just what it pleases; it means the lapse of coherence and interdependence, the enthronement of liberty and chaos. It means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence. It means the impossibility of great men—how could great men submit to the indignities and indecencies of an election? What chance would they have? “What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs, is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the notadorer,” the man who is not a “regular party-member.” How can the superman arise in such a soil? And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women become men.⁹⁰

Feminism, then, is the natural corollary of democracy and Christianity. “Here is little of man; therefore women try to make themselves manly. For only he who is enough of a man will save the woman in woman.” Ibsen, “that typical old maid,” created the “emancipated woman.” “Woman was created out of man’s rib?—‘wonderful is the poverty of my ribs!’ says man.” Woman has lost power and prestige by her “emancipation”; where have women now the position they enjoyed under the Bourbons? Equality between man and woman is impossible, because war between them is eternal; there is here no peace without victory—peace comes only when one or the other is acknowledged master. It is dangerous to try equality with a woman; she will not be content with that; she will be rather content with subordination if the man is a man. Above all, her perfection and happiness lie in motherhood. “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one answer: its name is childbearing.” “Man is for woman a means; the end is always the child. But what is woman for man? . . . A dangerous toy.” “Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; everything else is folly.” Yet “the perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer . . . . One cannot be gentle enough towards women.”⁹¹

Part of the tension of marriage lies in its fulfilment of the woman and its narrowing and emptying of the man. When a man woos a woman he offers to give all the world for her; and when she marries him he does; he must forget the world as soon as the child comes; the altruism of love becomes the egoism of the family. Honesty and innovation are luxuries of celibacy. “Where the highest philosophical thinking is concerned, all married men are suspect . . . . It seems to me absurd that one who has chosen for his sphere the assessment of existence as a whole should burden himself with the cares of a family, with winning bread, security, and social position for wife and children.” Many a philosopher has died when his child was born. “The wind blew through my key hole, saying, ‘Come!’ My door cunningly opened of itself, saying, ‘Go!’ But I lay fettered by my love unto my children.”⁹²

With feminism come socialism and anarchism; all of them are of the litter of democracy; if equal political power is just, why not equal economic power? Why should there be leaders anywhere? There are socialists who will admire the book of Zarathustra; but their admiration is not wanted. “There are some that preach my doctrine of life but at the same time are preachers of equality . . . . I do not wish to be confounded with these preachers of equality. For within me justice saith, ‘Men are not equal.’” “We wish to possess nothing in common.” “Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-insanity of impotence thus crieth out of yourselves for equality.” Nature abhors equality, it loves differentiation of individuals and classes and species. Socialism is anti-biologicaclass="underline" the process of evolution involves the utilization of the inferior species, race, class, or individual by the superior; all life is exploitation, and subsists ultimately on other life; big fishes catch little fishes and eat them, and that is the whole story. Socialism is envy: “they want something which we have.”⁹³ It is, however, an easily managed movement; all that is necessary to control it is to open occasionally the trap-door between masters and slaves and let the leaders of discontent come up into paradise. It is not the leaders that must be feared, but those lower down, who think that by a revolution they can escape the subordination which is the natural result of their incompetence and sloth. Yet the slave is noble only when he revolts.