Those who have read little in ethics are inclined
to attribute to Nietzsche a greater measure of originality
than he can reasonably claim. More than two milleniums
before him, Plato conceived an ideal Republic in which
moral laws, as commonly accepted, were to be set aside.
Marriage was to be done away with; births were to
be scientifically regulated; children were to be taken
from their mothers; sickly infants were to be destroyed.
In Sparta the committee of the elders did not permit
the promptings of sympathy and the cries of wounded
maternal love to influence the decision touching the
life or death of the new-born.
Here was an attempt at bridge-building, but it was
conceived as a scientific matter, to be taken in hand
by the State, and for the good of the State.
But Nietzsche would destroy the State. His Superman
appears as individualistic as a “rogue”
elephant, a few passages to the contrary notwithstanding.
Are we to regard him as a mere lawless egoist, or as
something more? We are left in the dark. [Footnote:
See the volume, Beyond Good and Evil, “What
is Noble?” Sec 265.] But we note that Nietzsche
disagrees with most moralists, in that he refuses to
regard Caesar Borgia as a morbid growth. [Footnote:
Ibid., The Natural History of Morals, Sec 197.
DOSTOIEVSKY’S genius has portrayed for us an
admirable Superman in the person of the Russian convict
Orloff. See his House of the Dead, chapter
v.]
The Superman has always been with us, in somewhat
varying types. From Alexander the Great to Napoleon,
and before and after, he adorns the pages of history.
Attila, among others, may enter his claim to consideration.
It remains for the serious student of ethics to estimate
scientifically his value as an ethical ideal, and to
judge how far this type of character may profitably
be taken as a pattern. Nietzsche stands at the
farthest possible remove from Hegel. Does he,
as an individualist, stand within hail of Kant?
It scarcely seems so. When we examine Kant’s
“practical reason,” in other words, the
moral law as it revealed itself to Kant, we find that
it had taken up into itself the moral development
of the ages preceding. Kant’s practical
reason, his conscience, to speak plain English, was
not the practical reason of, for example, Aristotle.
The latter could speak of a slave as an “animated
tool,” and could believe there were men intended
by nature for slavery. Kant could not. In
theory an individualist, the Sage of Konigsberg stands,
in reality, not far from Hegel. He does not break
with the past. But Nietzsche is revolt incarnate.
PART VIII
THE ETHICS OF THE SOCIAL WILL
CHAPTER XXX
ASPECTS OF THE ETHICS OF REASON
139. THE DOCTRINE SUPPORTED BY THE OTHER SCHOOLS.—–
I urge the more confidently the Ethics of Reason,
or the Ethics of the Rational Social Will, because
there is so little in it that is really new. It
only makes articulate what we all know already, and
strives to get rid of certain exaggerations into which
many men who reason, and who reason well, have unwittingly
fallen.
